BASSIST

Evan Jagels is an exciting and versatile upright and electric bassist and accomplished improvisor. He is cofounder of Duo Extempore, whose curated improvisations draw from classical and jazz virtuosity, weaving together storytelling, history, architecture, and audience interation. Together with NYC-based pianist Nicole Brancato, Duo Extempore explores every shape of improvised music through film production and live scoring, technology, and performance – pushing the boundaries of what piano and bass can do together.

Jagels is also creator of Improvignettes, a global collaborative project of short form musical improvisations inspired by flash fiction. Improvignettes are complete musical ideas of one minute or less performed and recorded asynchronously. Growing from this project, he has released two full-length albums with renowned German improvisor and multi-instrumentalist Scotty Böttcher.

An in-demand freelance jazz musician, Jagels has shared the stage with such luminaries as Ray Vega, Gerry Weldon, Stacy Dillard, Antonio Hart, Michael Mossman, Ray Anderson, John Stowell, Chuck Lamb, and four-time Grammy-Award winning cellist Eugene Friesen. Other performance highlights include Carnegie Hall, Flushing Town Hall, the Plaza Hotel, the Record Archive, the Blue Note in Germany and the UniJazz Festival in the Czech Republic.

He is Lecturer of Music at Hartwick College, and has presented Master Classes on improvisation at Hunter College (City University of New York), University of Southern Mississippi, SUNY Oneonta, and other arts and educational organizations.

evanjagels.com

DANCER

Angelica “Dzeli” Palmer (she/it) is an Interdisciplinary Social Practice Artist and Ritualist that explores the connections within ourselves, with each other, and with nature. Through song, dance, and storytelling, she creates visceral and emotional work rooted in the earth. For decades Angelica has led rituals, taught classes and hosted events interweaving community, activism, and the arts throughout the United States and Canada.

She is the founder of The Telegraph School, a home for the Healing & Performing Arts in Cherry Valley, NY, where she runs ongoing classes and events and hosts several annual festivals. She is the Board Treasurer for the Cherry Valley Community Facilities Corporation (“The Old School”). Angelica has a Masters in Creative Inquiry and Social Activism from the Experimental Performance Institute at New College of California in San Francisco and a Bachelors in Sustainable International Development and Statistics from Cornell University.

Angelica’s art is influenced by the art of her parents, improvisational avant garde jazz pianist Paul Bley and video artist Carol Goss, by the slow-moving deeply rooted nature of her community in Cherry Valley, by the beauty and vitality of its land and water, once home to the Kanien’kehá:ka people, and by the ancient Slavic and Animist practices of her ancestors.

dzeli.com and thetelegraphschool.org

PIANIST

Described as a “piano virtuoso” (The Daily Gazette, Saratoga Springs), Nicole Brancato focuses on the kinetic energy exchange in performances — with both her collaborators and her audience. In 2021, she partnered with artist Douglas Paulson and Plaxall Gallery to create .soundfullness: a salvaged piano installation that transforms outdoor spaces into places of deep listening.

Other collaborations include partnering with artist/author Sam Morris in “wait-list-only” performances at actor Alan Cumming’s NYC Club. Her Persephone & the Phoenix duo with violinist/composer Teagan Faran produces environmentally-focused and immersive works like 9 Ways to Destroy a Violin, commissioned by Nancy Manocherian’s the cell theatre in 2023. And with Duo Extempore, she and bassist Evan Jagels produced two cross-disciplinary films that weave together history, storytelling, and improvisation.

At the Guggenheim, Nicole participated in a “night at the museum,“ a multimedia staging of Satie’s Vexations with Christian Wolff, Philip Corner, David Del Tredici, and Joshua Rifkin, all of whom performed in John Cage’s legendary premiere of the work in 1963. This unique 19-hour concert was featured in The New York Times and Art News.

nicolebrancato.com

VIDEO ARTIST

Carol Goss has made and performed analog and digital video art since 1974. Performances have included the Public Theatre in NYC and the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Her work has been widely exhibited in the US and is in international collections. As a co-founder of Improvising Artists, along with jazz pianist Paul Bley, she has produced and released audio and video recordings with musicians such as: Sun Ra, Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, Jimmy Giuffre, and Gary Peacock, receiving several international awards.

In 1974 Nam June Paik sent her to the Experimental Television Center where she recorded on the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer and the David Jones Colorizer. During the 1970s she performed on the Bill Hearn Video Lab, and the Dan Sandin Synthesizer. Her interest in motion imaging led her to create, with a grant from the Museum of Holography in 1979, the first integral hologram to incorporate a raster-scanned video image (made with the Rutt-Etra Synthesizer) with a digital image.

In the 1980s she made the transition from analog to digital imaging tools. In the early 1990s the Amiga provided a viable platform for the improvisation of moving images in live performance. Since then Ms. Goss has continued to produce and exhibit work made with paint and animation software, plus in-camera imaging and editing. She has lectured on electronic motion imaging and the nature and meaning of abstraction at the Selcuk Universitesi in Konya, Turkey, at the Bunting Institute at Harvard-Radcliff, and at a philosophy colloquium at Columbia University.

In 1996 Ms. Goss founded the Not Still Art Festival to create an international forum for artists working in abstract and non-narrative electronic motion imaging with music and sound design. Not Still Art is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

improvart.com

PAINTER

Laura Is an artist and art therapist from Takoma Park, MD. She works with individuals experiencing PTSD in finding meaning and making peace through art.

Laura has a double major in studio art and psychology from the University of Virginia, a Master’s in Art Therapy from George Washington University, and she currently works at a non-profit clinic in Maryland.

DANCER

Emma Trahan (she/they) is a creative based in Canajoharie, NY. Emma is passionate about exploring collectivism and embodied knowledge as tools of liberation, and sharing these tools with others. They use movement and visual art as ways to explore her relationship to perceived societal roles, and to the world at large. Emma is a strong believer in the importance of art in everyday life, particularly in underserved and marginalized communities. She is excited to be sharing her love of improvisation with their community.

emmatrahan.com

DANCER

Aaron Water Piepszny has performed solo and group work, both choreographed and improvised, in Germany, Poland, the US, and Canada. Companies and collaborators include Jules Beckman, Larchaud Dance Project, Nancy Hughes, and Rita Vilhena.