Everyone!
We welcome you back to a new chapter of The FreeSessions on Sunday October 2nd from 7-9pm now at Westside Theater (1200 Shakespeare St. Ste. #2 Missoula, MT).
We are so excited to be back and are eager to see what this next chapter holds! Thank you to Westside Theater for their vision and support and to Amy Donovan Photography, Slant Street Records and Rattlesnake Cables for their generous support. Thank you.
It has been since March of 2020 since we’ve gathered in person, so here’s a little reminder of what we are about and also some dates you can mark in your calendar for our upcoming sessions (all of which will be held at Westside Theater).
Lakebottom is fiscally sponsored by Arts Missoula, Missoula’s Art and Culture Agency.
The FreeSessions is an improvised music and movement jam session to promote collaboration amongst performing artists in Missoula across genres and ages. Our aim is to cultivate a healthy musical eco-system in Missoula. We are fostering a climate of improvisation, transcending musical styles and structures. This session is to encourage active listening among all participants and a full acceptance of all musicians. It is a place to grow your musicality and yourself.
The FreeSessions is an incubation ground for new musical projects and collaborations. Every month a curator presents a new piece of music or concept or improvisation for the first 30 minutes.
Fall Sessions:
Sunday, October 2nd 7-9pm *Curated by Billy Kautz
Sunday, November 6th 7-9pm
Sunday, December 11th 7-9pm
Our curator for this session will be Billy Kautz. Please take a moment to read his post below.
Friends,
It is a great pleasure to curate the first in-person FreeSessions since March 1 of 2020. I am so excited to be back. I’ve missed this communion of artists. I hope to be able to reconnect with many of you at this session. Thank you in advance for reading.
For this session I will be playing unaccompanied cornet as I interpret one (or two) graphic scores by the composer, improviser, and electro-acoustic innovator Sarah Belle Reid. My dear friend Justin Matousek (Rainbow Gorilla Visuals) will be interpreting the graphic score with me by providing live visuals with his great expertise and fascinating imagination.
This is something I have never done before, and to my knowledge, neither has Justin. The drive behind this is to explore something that I find very fascinating and jump into it with courage and presence. All of the self-doubt and fears of failure that I regularly spar with as a musician are being put into a very advantageous position to taunt me as I go out and do such a vulnerable performance. But, I have less fear now than I ever have had with this instrument and as an artist.
I will be doing something I want to do, that I feel connected to and that represents who I am at that given moment. That is all that matters. This is something that I am using as a catalyst and a source of affirmation in all artistic endeavors I do as I have slowly reemerged as an artist in public late last Spring. I have wasted too much time as a developing artist obsessively fretting about what I don’t know and can’t yet do rather than building on what I do know, what I can do and embrace all that I am as a unique human being.
My ask for all of you in attendance, whether you come as a listener or as a participant in the following improvisations, is to be courageous tonight. And to be you.
These words and upcoming performance are dedicated to my incredible wife, Aria, and all 3 of my incredible children, Rita (6), Frederik (3) and Sterling, who died in September of 2019 but is deeply connected to each of us every day.
