The avant-jazz duo of Catherine Sikora (tenor and soprano saxophones) and Brian Chase (drumset) pairs two distinguished artists who together tear the line of innovation and tradition. At once lyrical and powerful, their music opens itself to a wide emotional range which in turn provides for a broad expressive palette. Catherine's voice on her instruments offers an impressive breadth of tone and color, fashioning and re-contextualizing melody as it sings and weaves through its many journeys. Brian on drumset is just as apt to use texture in addition to rhythm to drive the music, setting the scene for unlimited possibilities. The duo's debut recording, untitled:after, emerged from several years of their playing together. In composing the music for this album, Catherine and Brian turned to the stories of the classic epic poem Beowulf. These tales of adventure, courage, battle, travail, and honor, proved to be analogous to current life experience; discovering this through music and improvisation provided endless inspiration. Think John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space meets epic poetry as depicted in an adaptation for film.
Saxophonist, improviser and composer Catherine Sikora was born and raised in West Cork, Ireland. Self taught to begin with, she moved to New York City to study and play with great improvisers. Sikora works in a broad range of settings, from highly complex composed music, to folk songs, to free improvisation. Her regular collaborations include those with Eric Mingus, Enrique Haneine, Brian Chase, Han-earl Park, Stanley Zappa, Christopher Culpo and Ross Hammond, as well as actively pursuing solo performance. In the past few years, she has toured in Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia. As an international artist, Sikora was a featured soloist in Eric Mingus’ radical reimagining of Tommy by the Who presented at Australia's Adelaide Festival in 2015, and was artist-in-residence at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris for the fall of 2014 working on a project inspired by stories from her female ancestors. Catherine's first solo album 'Jersey' was released on Relative Pitch Records in July 2016.
Brian Chase is a drummer and composer living in Brooklyn. His diverse range of work includes that with Grammy nominated rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the community of the New York experimental music scene, and his solo project Drums and Drones. Performances have taken him across the world to the Sydney Opera House (with Karen O's Stop the Virgens and Nick Zinner's 41 Strings), UK’s Reading and Leeds Festivals (with Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Toronto’s X Avant Festival (with Drums and Drones), and throughout NYC to such notable venues as The Stone, Pioneer Works, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recorded works include several with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the debut Drums and Drones CD/DVD, and albums with guitarist Alan Licht, clarinetist Jeremiah Cymerman, and accordionist/electronic musician Andrea Parkins. Brian has held a performance residency at John Zorn's venue The Stone in 2016 and an artist residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2015.
Catherine Sikora & Brian Chase Duo
Catherine Sikora at The Stone.
