About this Event

The Brunt is the collaborative quartet of Dave Rempis, Gerrit Hatcher, Kent Kessler and Bill Harris. The four craft long form free improvisations with dense energy and expansive scope. Saxophonist, improviser, and composer Dave Rempis has been an integral part of the thriving Chicago jazz and improvised music scene since 1997. With a background in ethnomusicology and African studies at Northwestern University, including a year spent at the University of Ghana, Rempis burst onto the creative music scene at the age of 22 when he was asked to join the now-legendary Chicago jazz outfit The Vandermark Five. This opportunity catapulted him to notoriety as he began to tour regularly throughout the US and Europe, an active schedule that he still maintains to the present day. Gerrit Hatcher is a Chicago-based tenor saxophonist, improviser, and composer. Hatcher’s work typically engages with free jazz as a craft and set of practices that is as much historical as it is experimental. Gerrit has been involved in several working groups and other ensembles, based in Chicago and beyond. The prolific and in-demand jazz bassist Kent Kessler may be best known for his role in numerous Chicago bands, usually associated with reedman Ken Vandermark, but he has led or co-led nearly two dozen recordings on labels from Okka Disc and Atavistic to Not Two, Palomar, and Trost. He has played on more than a hundred others. He first began appearing on recordings in the early ’90s as a member of Hal Russell’s NRG Ensemble. Bill Harris is a percussionist, improviser, and audio engineer in Chicago. He also operates and produces for Amalgam, a Chicago-based label and collective, and co-operates Chicago recording studio Marmalade. Some of his primary groups are Je’raf: a psychadelic funk/free jazz/hip-hop group from the future; KAH: an improvising trio with Jeff Kimmel and Ishmael Ali; Hearsay: with Allen Moore and Ishmael Ali; Joybird: with Jess McIntosh and Aaron Smith; Errata: with Ishmael Ali and Eli Namay. Additionally, Genetti/Long/Sugimoto/Clark Emerging from the currents of Chicago’s experimental and creative music scene, this first-time meeting of Carol Genetti (voice/electronics), Chad M. Clark (electric guitar), Mai Sugimoto (saxophone/composition), and Norman W. Long (sound art/field recordings) forms a compelling, cross-disciplinary improvisation collective with a rich and layered identity.