2000 Artist Support Program

Charlie Burks (1946-2018) was a Seattle poet; author of the play Marvin, the Nephew of God and the book/CD Since the Ace; coordinated Western Edge, a writers publication put out by Arts Resource Services; and was a regular at Red Sky Poetry Theater.

Artist Support Program 2000: Since the Ace

Marcos and Rubina Carmona are flamenco artists who have dedicated themselves to the Sevilla, or modern traditionalist form of flamenco. Though originally from San Francisco, they both now reside in Seattle, Washington. At the age of twenty, Marcos began to study flamenco guitar while his wife Rubina developed her skills as a flamenco singer and dancer. Soon after, they traveled with their daughter to Seville, Spain where they studied with Romanies. Following extended stays in Spain, the Carmonas performed flamenco professionally in Hollywood and finally moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1989. In 1996, Marcos and Rubina created Flamenco Arts Northwest, a non-profit arts organization for the promotion of the song, dance and music of Andalusia.

Carmona Flamenco has made extensive concert, festival, and cabaret appearances throughout Spain and the United States. Often performing with guest artists, Marcos and Rubina Carmona’s Carmona Flamenco specializes in contemporary and tradtional flamenco music, dance, and song. The Carmonas have appeared in Madrid, Sevilla, Valencia, Alicante, and Huelva, as well as San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, B.C., Portland, Tampa, and Los Angeles. Currently based in Seattle, Washington, Carmona Flamenco has become one of the Pacific Northwest’s premier performance groups.

Carmona Flamenco was part of Jack Straw’s Traditional Artist Support Program.

Artist Support Program 2000: Record contemporary flamenco music for guitar and voice, including “Soleares de Triana,” commissioned by the Seattle Arts Commission.

Gordana Crnković is a professor and Chair in the Slavic Languages and Literature Department at the University of Washington.  Her book of essays, Imagined Dialogues, creates imaginary dialogues between East European and American stories.

Artist Support Program 2000: Zagreb Everywhere, a creative non-fiction piece that presents her native city Zagreb, Croatia in a spoken-work piece overlaid with sounds from the city.

Thomasa Eckert grew up in a family of opera singers. She specializes in twentieth century music, particularly those compositions requiring a theatrical presentation. Her ensemble The Bird Tribe Orchestra included Richard III aka Rich Eckert, Sid Law, Thomasa Eckert, and Matthew Lyon.

Artist Support Program 2004: Recorded their album Palace of the Birds

Artist Support Program 2000: Recorded their album Red Ruby Palace

Christos Govetas is a gifted multi-instrumentalist who brings his authentic voice and earthy clarinet style from his homeland in Eastern Macedonia. After moving to this country in his teens, Christos discovered his love of traditional music and went on to learn regional music from all over Greece, and beyond. In addition to the clarinet, Christos plays the zourná, bouzouki, and outi, bringing his 30 years of performing experience to the mix. Christos is a beloved teacher at many music and dance workshops and has performed and toured extensively in the US, Canada, Europe and Greece. Christos leads the group Dromeno, plays with Pasatempo Rebetika, and also plays laouto and sings regional Greek music with Ziyiá. Christos is the 1999 recipient of the prestigious Northwest Folklife Fellowship Award honoring his cultural contribution to the Greek-American and folk dance communities. Christos is also a member of Bill Frisell’s Grammy nominated The Intercontinentals.

Christos and his wife Ruth were integral members of the traditional five-piece Greek folk band known as Pangéo, in which Christos played the clarinet, Ruth played the accordion, and both also performed as vocalists. Christos and Pangéo were part of Jack Straw’s Traditional Artist Support Program

Artist Support Program 2000 (with Pangéo): Produce the CD Northern Borders, featuring the music of Greek Macedonia and Epiros.

Ela Lamblin is a sculptor and musician.

In 1989, at the age of sixteen, he was awarded a scholarship to attend the Atlanta College of Art. He graduated with a BFA in sculpture in 1993. While at ACA Ela began experimenting with combining sound with form to create musical sculptures, a process that has resulted in more than forty large-scale musical instruments to date. From college onward, Ela’s art has encompassed sculpture, music, film, and movement in live performance. Ela’s artistic horizons continue to expand as he erases the lines between disciplines to create multi-faceted works that now include design and fabrication of public art, architectural design and planning, numerous recordings, short films and scores.

In addition to Lelavision’s performance work, Lamblin has received two commissions for permanent public sculpture – Whirl Piece (2006, Yesler Terrace Community Center, Seattle, WA) and Welcome to the Wheel World (2008, Beacon Hill International School, Seattle, WA). He has also produced five CDs of music on his invented musical sculptures, the first of which, Sculptaural, was recorded through Jack Straw’s Artist Support Program (1996). Others include Raga to the River, classical Indian Raga in the Dhrupad tradition (2000), and Long Period Events, engineered by Grammy nominated record producer, Tucker Martine (2005). Lamblin received the Artist Fellowship in music from Artist Trust in 2004.

Artist Support Program 2000: Recorded his album Tone Pond

Artist Support Program 1996: Recorded Sculptaural, his first musical sculpture album

KT Niehoff is an artist whose focus is the complex relationship between bodies and space. She creates multi-sensory, multi-dimensional, immersive performance environments, with highly crafted audience participation. These experiences both integrate and transcend choreography, music, design, film and technology, narrative and audience/artist proximity. In 1992, KT was invited by choreographic pioneer Pat Graney to perform Graney’s masterpiece, Faith, bringing KT to Seattle, where the city’s Punk Riot Grrl politics and energy was the perfect incubator for her actionist nature.

KT was a founding member of D-9, an all-female cooperative that commissioned, produced and performed new dance work. She envisioned and co-founded with Michele Miller Velocity Dance Center, a vital arts resource and incubator for thousands of movement artists. During her career she has built over 30 works that have toured performance venues, festivals and colleges throughout the US and in Japan, Canada, Germany and Ecuador.

As an educator, KT has built three pedagogical systems that she has taught and refined for 20 years. Reinvent Your Eye – Tools for Abstract Composition, Physical Practice, a daily training class for professional dancers and her film workshop, Frame by Frame. She has taught at numerous festivals and universities including Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Oberlin College, Cornish College of the Arts, Texas Christian University, Mt. Holyoke, The University of Washington, The Hong Kong Academy of the Performing Arts and the SNDO, Amsterdam.

Artist Support Program 2005 (with Adam McCollum): Record a score for Relatively Real, a new performance by Lingo Dancetheater.

Artist Support Program 2000: Record a score by Bob Barazza for the performance piece Dysfunction.

Koo Nimo is a living legend from Ghana, playing multiple forms of traditional music, as well as new music, informed by Western influences. Nimo (also known as Daniel Amponsah, from his days in London) grew up as part of the royal family of Ghana (his sister married the king), where he learned to play the traditional red and black kete drums of the royal ensembles. By the time he was 19, he was teaching drumming, guitar, and brass band music in his native village of Foase.

While in London thereafter on a chemistry scholarship, he took formal instruction in guitar. After returning to Ghana, he took a position as chief laboratory technician in the chemistry department of the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi (where he retired in 1998). He remained an active musician during this time and was the head of the Musicians Union. In 1957, he formed the Ghanaian roots ensemble Adadam Agofomma, which received considerable acclaim.

Along with the kete drumming he learned in his youth, he became a virtuoso in the palmwine guitar style, a complicated pattern of two-finger picking. It is this palmwine style for which he is most famous. His playing is influenced heavily by brass band highlife (an earlier phenomenon in urban Africa), American giants such as Charlie Christian, as well as Spanish guitar styles. He is one of the most respected artists in African music, though he ignores the Afro-beat style. He was the first Ghanaian to release a CD, Osabarima. He has received the Grand Medal for Lifetime Service to Ghana, and huge acclaim worldwide, playing in Europe, Africa, and America (Lincoln Center in 1988).

Artist Support Program 2000: Recorded his album Tete Wobi Ka

Tom Baker has been active as a composer, performer, and music producer in the new-music scene since arriving in Seattle in 1994. He is the artistic director of the Seattle Composers’ Salon, co-founder of the Seattle EXperimental Opera (SEXO), and an advisory board member of the Washington Composers’ Forum. Baker’s works have been performed throughout the United States, Canada and in Europe. His two most recent chamber operas, The Gospel of the Red-Hot Stars (2006) and Hunger: The Journey of Tamsen Donner (2008), were both premiered by the Seattle EXperimental Opera and are available on the Present Sounds label. Baker has received numerous accolades for his work including awards and grants from Meet The Composer, the Seattle Arts Commission, King County Arts Commission, Artist Trust, and Jack Straw Cultural Center. He was also awarded a fellowship in 2006 as an associate artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, where he spent three weeks working with composer and saxophonist Henry Threadgill.

In 2011, Baker was chosen to be a resident artist at the Montalvo Center in Saratoga, CA, where he completed the first in a series of ten quartets based on a book of stories by Italo Calvino. As a guitarist (on both fretted and unfretted instruments), Baker has appeared in concerts and recitals throughout the United States including Seattle, San Francisco and New York, as well as in The Netherlands. Baker earned his DMA in Composition from the University of Washington, where he studied composition with Chinary Ung, William O. Smith, and John Rahn. His music has been recorded on several labels, including Rosewood Recordings, Acoustic Levitation, Present Sounds Recordings, and Engine Records.

Artist Support Program 2015: Record and mix new compositions for solo piano and soprano, trumpet, and percussion.

Artist Support Program 2009 (with Seattle Experimental Opera): Record Hunger: The Journey of Tamsen Donner, a new opera about The Donner Party.

Artist Support Program 2006: Record Gospel of the Red-Hot Stars, an “operatorio” based on texts by Margaret Atwood.

Artist Support Program 2004: Record four song cycles for vocalists accompanied by various chamber groupings.

Artist Support Program 2002: Record a composition for string quartet and spoken word.

Artist Support Program 2000: Record a cycle of four songs for baritone, piano and cello, and a work for eight voices.

Guitarist Steve Ball has toured, recorded, and performed all over world, most visibly as a member of Robert Fripp and the League of Crafty Guitarists and various League spin-off groups. He is an active and founding member of the Seattle Guitar Circle, and formerly a member of Prometheus, as well as acclaimed Discipline Global Mobile artists Los Gauchos Alemanes, and the Electric Gauchos.

From 1994 – 1998, Steve made frequent trips to Argentina, playing guitar with Fripp/League spin-off band, Los Gauchos Alemanes. In 1992, he also became a partner in a record label and publishing company called Deep Music, whose catalog includes a progressive collaboration with Sanford Ponder called Prometheus, and two titles featuring orchestrated fractal music by the LA ensemble, Botanica, as well as the first studio recordings by Boston singer Mary Lou Lord.

Artist Support Program 2000

Dan Blunck is a saxophonist and flutist based in the northwest. He began playing music in 1977, studied music at Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham, OR. and completed a BA degree in liberal arts at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. He spent nine years in the US Navy Band and has performed throughout North and South America, as well locations in Europe and West Africa.

Artist Support Program 2000: Recorded the album Concerted with Mike Bisio

Jose Carrillo, producer, translator, reader, was born in Durango, Dgo. Mexico, grew up in San Francisco where he graduated from SF State, having studied, music, theater, and poetry. He now lives in Seattle close to his daughters and granddaughters. Currently, Jose free lances in music as a flutist, an actor and writer. He is a member and website manager of Los Norteños Seattle Latino Writers Group. He is also a member of the Cascadia Jazz Big Band in Lynnwood and the Seattle Flute Society.

Artist Support Program 2009: Produce high quality recordings of original literary works by members of Los Norteños Writers and others, prepared in bilingual, Spanish-English editions.

Artist Support Program 2000: produce a CD of original music.

The exotic dance style called charanga may have originated in Cuba, but one of the genre’s finest bands is the Seattle, Washington, USA-based Yerbabuena. While charanga is their musical speciality, Yerbabuena is very adept at other exotic dance genres as well, including son, cha-cha-chá, guaguancó, and danzón. This large group of musicians has been together in one form or another since 1994, with members including Tom Bergersen (guiro/conga), Barney Brazitis (bass), Astrae Doty-Vargas (vocals), Theodora Fogarty (violin), Marc Gavin (violin), Fred Hoadley (piano/tres/vocals), Elspeth Macdonald (lead vocals/clarinet), Heather Ballard and Irene Mitri (violin), Sabra Weber and Jim O’Halloran (flute), Steve Smith and Ernesto Pediangco (bongo/guiro), and Lance Lu and Chris Stromquist (timbales). While the group do perform some original material, Yerbabuena opt to play songs from renowned Cuban artists including Buena Vista Social Club, Orquesta Aragón, Los Van Van, Benny Moré, Eliades Ochoa, Candido Fabré, and Original De Manzanillo. Although they had been a band for quite some time, Yerbabuena did not release a proper studio recording until 2001’s Vaiven De Mar.

Artist Support Program 2005: Produce a CD of original songs and arrangements for 11-piece Cuban orchestra

Artist Support Program 2000: Recorded their debut album Vaiven De Mar

Bob Edgerton (1935-2020) was a scientist, teacher, and musician. He loved singing and played many instruments including the Sousaphone, banjo, recorders, clarinet, and tenor sax. He took up the cello at age 52 and his passion for classical music fueled many friendships in the Seattle chamber music scene.

Artist Support Program 2000

Elizabeth Falconer is one of the few American masters of the koto, a traditional zither from Japan.  She began playing the koto in 1979. She earned a junshihan (associate degree) from the Seiha Koto School, studying under Nagane Utayumi. This school focused on classical works. She later moved to Tokyo and studied under the esteemed Sawai Kazue and Sawai Tadao at the Sawai Koto School, and earned a Shihan (master’s license) at the Sawai Koto School, which focuses on contemporary works.

Artist Support Program 2005 (with John Falconer): Production of the album Affinity, by the duo En.

Artist Support Program 2000

Artist Support Program 1998

Singer/pianist/composer Carolyn Graye has performed in West Coast clubs, concerts and theatres since 1976. Locally, she has appeared at Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley, Bumbershoot, the Bellevue Jazz Festival, the West Seattle Jazz Festival, Earshot’s New City Series and A Contemporary Theatre (ACT.) She lived in Prague (1997-1998) and performed at festivals and clubs throughout the Czech Republic in addition to touring the Balkans (Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia) on a USIA performance and teaching grant. She also performed in La Paz, Bolivia at the invitation of the U. S. Embassy there. Her self-titled debut CD spotlights Jessica Williams, Julian Priester and Jay Thomas and features thoughtful compositions, solid swinging piano and singing that the Prague Post called “witty and curiously conversational.”

Artist Support Program 2000: Recording an album of composed and freely improvised instrumental music as accompaniment to a recorded reading of deceased Seattle poet Denise Levertov.

Originally from New England, Fred Hoadley studied music at Hampshire College and Berklee College of Music, where his teachers included Jaki Byard, Vishnu Wood, and Charlie Banacos. He founded the Seattle salsa band Bochinche in 1983, produced the band’s first album, and founded the Seattle based Afro-Cuban Jazz band, Sonando, whose 1994, 1998, & 2006 releases received critical acclaim around the country. He also plays piano and tres in Sonando, Charanga Danzón, Wesito & Friends, The Susan Carr Ensemble, and Sexteto Tradicuba.

(Photo by Daniel Sheehan)

Artist Support Program 2000

Composer, arranger and steel drum performer from Trinidad, Ray Holman is perhaps the most talented proponent of his art form internationally.

He has arranged and recorded with steel bands and artists in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Japan and Europe, including televised performances with the German National Orchestra which showcased his compositions. He composed the highly acclaimed score for Black Orpheus, staged by Crossroads Theatre Company in New Jersey in 1991, and has been a featured performer in film, television and at venues such as Madison Square Garden, the Super Bowl and the St. Lucia Jazz Festival.

A University of the West Indies graduate and former high school teacher, he has conducted workshops at West Virginia University and was a Commissioned Composer in the California State University Summer Arts Program. He regularly attends the bi-annual steelband tuning and arranging workshop at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California and has done presentations at meetings of the Percussive Arts Society. During 1998-2000 he was a distinguished Visiting Artist in the Ethnomusicology Program at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Ray has won many prestigious musical awards, including the Hummingbird Silver Medal of Merit from the Government of Trinidad and Tobago and a Pan Legend Award from the New York Folk Arts Institute and the U.S. Congress. He was recognized for his musical contribution by the Republic Pan Fiesta 2003, A Tribute to Ray Holman.

His first album, A Tribute to Ray Holman, featured eight of his Panorama compositions. With his jazz sensibility and unique improvisational style, Ray continues to delight audiences worldwide with the timeless quality of his music.

Artist Support Program 2000: Recorded his music album In Touch

Laura Kaminsky is an award-winning American composer, producer of musical and multidisciplinary cultural events, and educator. From 1999 to 2004, she served as chair of the music department at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. She has received national recognition for her innovative cultural programming and has held posts at several prestigious institutions, including New York City’s 92nd Street Y, Town Hall, and Symphony Space.

Kaminsky has maintained an active composing studio and has had her music performed internationally. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and fellowships, and her music has been extensively recorded. In 1984, she co-founded and remains the artistic director of the new music collective, Musicians Accord.

Kaminsky has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Opera America, New York State Council on the Arts, Aaron Copland Fund, Chamber Music America, American Music Center, USArtists International, CEC ArtsLink International Partnerships, Likhachev Foundation, Kenan Institute for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission, North Carolina Arts Council, Meet the Composer, and others. She has received six ASCAP-Chamber Music America Awards for Adventurous Programming and the Polish Ministry of Culture National Heritage 2010 Chopin Award.

Artist Support Program 2000 (with Musicians Accord): The Brazil Project

David Knott, MM, MT-BC is a board-certified music therapist, fellow in the Academy of Neurologic Music Therapy, instrument maker, improvisor and composer living and working in Seattle.  In Fall of 2016 he completed the randomized control study “Immediate Effects of Training with Musical Mnemonics on Verbal Memory in Children” and earned a Master of Music degree with a specialization in Music Therapy from Colorado State University.  He specializes in using improvisation to engage and facilitate therapeutic change with critically ill children.

Since 1981, David has been playing and recording his own music solo and in collaboration with others. His interest in music and soundmaking comes from a personal, intuitive response to vibration gleaned from early years spent exploring his grandfather’s junkyard, the process of building his guitar at the Roberto-Venn School in 1994 and every improvised musical experience.  With instrument building, performances, workshops and recorded works, he seeks to stimulate the listener to a point of resonance and discovery of their own musical being.

In addition to periodic solo performances and sonic socials, he is a founding member of animist orchestra – an ensemble that uses natural materials to create very quiet, subtly evolving soundscapes.  He performs and records with the graphic and text notation dedicated ensemble Eye Music as well as Omake & Johnson, Messenger Girls Trio and the Yes, Well . . .

Additionally, he has made interactive installations in public and private settings which seek to provide participants with opportunities to realize kinesthetic expressions in sound and promote deeper listening.

Artist Support Program 2000

Robert Millis is a founding member of Climax Golden Twins, Messenger Girls Trio, and AFCGT. Solo or in collaboration he has composed soundtracks, worked with choreographers, created sound installations and released numerous CDs and LPs, including the soundtrack to the horror film Session 9 (directed by Brad Anderson), the recent 120 on Etude Records, and AFCGT on Subpop. He performs solo utilizing field recordings, 78rpm ambiance, collage, guitar, old murder ballads and half remembered drones. Rob works extensively with the Dust-to-Digital and Sublime Frequencies record labels on archival projects that document traditional and folk music, including Victrola Favorites (released on the Dust-to-Digital label) and the documentary film Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan, about a Thai Buddhist ghost festival (released on DVD by Sublime Frequencies). For these and other projects he has worn several hats – cameraman, film editor, designer, etc. An experienced sound and recording engineer, he has produced several documentary CDs of music and ambiance from Asia, recorded “in the field.” He received an Artist Trust Fellowship for music in 2005.

New Media Gallery 2011: Fragments of the Story

Artist Support Program 2000

Doug Nufer is a specialist in literary constraints, a technique that applies certain conditions to or establishes a pattern within writing. Doug is the author of Negativeland (Autonomedia), Never Again (Four Walls Eight Windows/ Black Square), and On the Roast (Chiasmus), all of which came out in 2004, and of The Mudflat Man/ The River Boys (soultheft records, 2006), and his stories and poems have appeared in magazines and literary journals.

2007 Writers Program

2000 Artist Support Program

Amy Rubin, pianist and composer, has written and performed music in all genres – for the concert stage, jazz ensemble, film, television and theater, both in the U.S. and abroad. Her fearless eclecticism and desire to embrace all music regardless of style have brought her recent awards including the Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship, the King County Special Projects Award, the 2005 Jack Straw Artist Support Award and commission funds from the Seattle Arts Commission.

In summer 1999, Hallelujah Games, an all-Rubin CD, was released on the Mode label. Music from her sextet, “La Loba” was danced to by the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company in their national tour 2003-2004 of the Flight Project. Rubin’s most recent CD Like Ships That Pass… presents a retrospective of the last few year’s live performances of her solo piano pieces, chamber pieces, and a work for piano and chamber orchestra by that title.

As educator, Rubin ran the Musicianship Program at SUNY at Stony Brook, was an Assistant Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey where she directed all musical activities on campus, and was a Visiting Professor and the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.

Rubin now lives in Seattle where she composes, performs, teaches, lectures and collaborates.

Artist Support Program 2005: Produce a series of radio portraits of pianists working in many different styles of music around the country.

Artist Support Program 2001: Produced The Rubin-Clement Piano Dialogues with Dawn Clement

Artist Support Program 2000

Crispin Spaeth has been making dances in Seattle since 1990. Her award-winning work with Crispin Spaeth Dance Group (1992-2007) was commissioned by Western Bridge, Consolidated Works, On the Boards, Velocity Dance Center, and Seattle’s Center on Contemporary Art, among others. With a legion of collaborators, she has created seven full-evenings, and over 30 smaller works for CSDG, and other theater and dance companies, including D9, Cornish, On the Boards, Freehold, Velocity, One World, and Printer’s Devil, among others. Through CSDG and other producing collaborations, Spaeth has curated and produced over a dozen evenings of multi-disciplinary short works, including the Seattle-Portland exchange of Mike Barber’s Ten Tiny Dances. She graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in Visual Art.

Artist Support Program 2000