$15-$30, 21+, 8PM
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https://creativemusicguild.org/

Andy Clausen
https://andyclausen.bandcamp.com/music
https://orcd.co/fewillwords
https://www.andyclausen.com/
https://www.instagram.com/aclausent/

Andy Clausen is a New York-based trombonist, composer, producer, and educator.
A graduate of The Juilliard School, Andy served as principal conductor and Artistic Director for Jazz at New York Youth Symphony from 2016-2023, and in 2021 joined the faculty of The New School as an Artist in Residence and professor of trombone and composition.
As a composer, Andy has worked in a variety of formats, from orchestral and large ensemble commissions, classical and jazz chamber music projects, as well as numerous film, television, radio, and podcast productions. For more info, see projects.
An in-demand collaborator across genres, Andy has performed, recorded, and arranged for for artists including:
Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Aaron Dessner, Big Red Machine, Joanna Newsom, Common, Big Thief, Feist, A$AP Ferg, Muzz, Remi Wolf, Anaïs Mitchell, Aoife O’Donovan, Haley Heynderickx, Vieux Farka Touré, Wynton Marsalis, Ron Carter, Benny Golson, Frank Wess, Gerald Wilson, Bill Frisell, Kurt Elling, Joe Lovano, Theo Bleckmann, Kate Davis, Celisse Henderson, Nico Muhly, Maria Schneider, Dave Douglas, Wayne Horvitz, Conrad Tao, Gabriel Kahane, John Zorn, and The American Brass Quintet. For more info, see discography.

Andy has appeared at such wide-ranging venues as Carnegie Hall, The Hollywood Bowl, Red Rocks, Coachella, The Kennedy Center, Newport Folk Festival, Newport Jazz Festival, SF Jazz, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Pitchfork Music Festival, Radio City Music Hall, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and NPR Tiny Desk.
Andy is a founding member of acclaimed new music brass quartet The Westerlies. The Westerlies navigate a wide array of venues and projects with the precision of a string quartet, the audacity of a rock band, and the charm of a family sing-along. “Skilled interpreters who are also adept improvisers” (NPR’s Fresh Air), The Westerlies explore jazz, roots, and chamber music influences to create the rarest of hybrids: music that is both "folk-like and composerly, lovely and intellectually rigorous” (NPR Music).
3 - The Westerlies by Shervin Lainez 2018 (Stylized).jpg
Since their founding in 2012, The Westerlies have produced a prolific and critically acclaimed body of chamber music recordings: their 2014 debut, Wish the Children Would Come On Home: The Music of Wayne Horvitz, a 2016 double-CD The Westerlies, the 2020 release, Wherein Lies the Good, their 2021 collaboration with vocalist Theo Bleckmann, This Land, and numerous additional digital releases, live recordings, and collaborations through their label Westerlies Music.
A passionate educator Andy has taught masterclasses at Yale, The Colburn School, The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, The New School, University of Maryland, and University of Washington, as well as hundreds of public schools across the country.

Andy is a Conn-Selmer, Eventide Audio, and Moog Artist. He lives in Fort Greene Brooklyn with his wife Rachel. Aside from music, he enjoys cooking, biking, walking, travel, and photography.

Brandon Seabrook
https://brandonseabrook.bandcamp.com/
https://linktr.ee/brandonseabrook75
https://www.instagram.com/brandonseabr00k/

Brandon Seabrook cemented himself long ago as a pillar of the fertile Brooklyn DIY avant-garde underground, the same scene anchored by improvising guitarists such as Mary Halvorson, Ava Mendoza, and Marc Ribot. While each of those visionaries has carved out their own singular niche derived from forms of the jazz-centric idiom, Seabrook occupies sound worlds all his own. Is it jazz? Metal? Classical? Folk? Punk? It’s all of the above—usually at the same time.

Regardless, few artists have the breadth of command, hyper-speed intensity, and idiosyncratic touch on both guitar and banjo. In a word, Seabrook shreds. Albums like In The Swarm by his trio with Cooper-Moore and Gerald Cleaver, and Convulsionaries, by his strings group with Henry Fraser and Daniel Levin, are time signature–loaded face-rippers that demonstrate Seabrook’s raison d’être: steamroll the listener into submission with extreme physicality.

Brutalovechamp is a different beast, and it affirms Seabrook’s boundary-smashing, prolific sensibility. He shows that he can dial down his signature free-for-all blasts of guitar notes and riffs, favoring a decidedly more subtle approach—at least for him.

Even though Seabrook’s Epic Proportions contains three members who helped fuel the dizzily complex and corrosive avant-metal mania of 2017’s Die Trommel Fatale, this new group has its own distinct voice. The record showcases a reshuffled ensemble that combines the players from Die Trommel Fatale (cellist Marika Hughes; contrabassist Eivind Opsvik; electronics and voice master Chuck Bettis; and drummer and multi-instrumentalist Sam Ospovat) with newcomers Nava Dunkelman (percussion, glockenspiel, voice), Henry Fraser (contrabass), and John McCowen (contrabass clarinet, Bb clarinet, alto and bass recorder).

The two records couldn’t be any more different, navigating opposite ends of the spectrum, both sonically and stylistically. Die Trommel Fatale had more in common with the sort of mythical black metal that Krallice squelches out, but filtered through the prism of punk jazz; brutalovechamp nods to 1970s, utopian folk rock meets Nels Cline’s boundless guitar heroics meets the polystylism made famous by 20th century composers like Alfred Schnittke. What culminates from this motley crew of influences is a meticulously pieced-together, intimate sprawl of blissed-out, proggy maelstroms alongside playfully eccentric stretches that place Seabook’s freakishly inventive compositional mettle at center stage.

In the album notes, Seabrook notes that he wrote the music that makes up brutalovechamp at a time when his “personal and artistic lives were in drastic flux.” Those feelings of uncertainty, hopelessness, and reflection are laid bare on the title track, a 10-minute-long tour de force worth the price of admission alone. The tranquil sound of McCowen’s alto recorder is the very first sound you hear on brutalovechamp before Seabrook’s enters the fray with an equally soothing picking of mandolin.

It isn’t long before the music goes full tilt, though. The aggro-prog twang Seabrook lets loose invokes the country-fried chugging of Meat Puppets II and Blood on the Tracks/Desire-era Dylan—if the latter were under the influence of free jazz and a good dose of speed. “I Wanna Be Chlorophylled I: Corpus Conductor” is cut from a similarly heady and bucolic cloth, driven into screeching overdrive by the three-pronged strings team of Hughes, Fraser, and Opsvik and Ospovat’s percussive fireworks. “The Perils of Self-Betterment” furthers Seabrook’s knack for mandolin shredding as Bettis puts his own stamp on the track with a splattering of electronics-fueled swirls and swooshes. Meanwhile, “Gutbucket Asylum” and “Compassion Montage,” powered by Bettis’s and Dunkelman’s demonic yelps, respectively, sound like carnival music from the depths of hell.

Sure, this may sound as if brutalovechamp is straight-up batshittery—and, indeed, some of it certainly retains the mangled guitar chaos for which Seabrook is notorious. But it’s also, arguably, his most laser-focused, melodic, and compact effort to date and one that provides a listening experience that is pure exhilaration and deeply meditative—due in large part to his Epic Proportions group, who help realize his vision. The newfound sense of patience and space produces an invitation to fully absorb all of the fine detail and otherworldly vernacular of Seabrook’s guitar wizardry.