This was my last recorded concert before the lock down. My last concert was at the legendary Churchill’s in Miami the following week before heading to Europe to start a 3-month tour (which was completely canceled within hours of my arrival). As a New Mexican resident it’s a special honor and such a pleasure to play The Outpost Performance Space. This listening room that Tom Guralnick has cultivated for years has been a mainstay for wide varieties of adventurous music. Dave and Carlos and I have played together in various configurations over the years including with Dave on ‘With’, my album in duo with drummers put out on Union Pole Tapes several years ago. Carlos has been a mainstay in Santa Fe as a musician as well as the main director of High Mayhem Emerging Arts which has provided opportunities for the community and touring musicians for a couple of decades now. This evening I was asked to play a solo piano set followed by the trio. So, I included a segment of that set as well as a larger segment of the trio.
Carlos Santistevan is a musician, sounds engineer, and organizer. Since 2001 he has helped establish an oasis of creative music in the high desert southwest as the director of the High Mayhem Emerging Arts collective based out of Santa Fe, NM. Using an upright bass and electronics he creates soundscapes and spontaneous compositions from the extremes of acoustic and electric music. Early influences of punk rock and free jazz have led him to develop a unique approach to music and improvisation. He has performed at High Zero Festival, Ende Tymes Festival, The Outpost Performance Space, Hemlock Tavern, SITE Santa Fe, the Empty Bottle, Outsound Creative Music Festival, The Olympia Experimental Music Festival, High Mayhem Festival and more performing with such artists as: J.A. Dino Deane, Laura Ortman, Thollem McDonas, Tania Caroline Chen, Marshall Trammell, Chris Jonas, Tatsuya Nakatani and more. Carlos is a seasoned improviser and a member of diverse ensembles such as In Defense of Memory, iNK oN pAPER, The Uninvited Guest(s), The Late Severa Wires, Out of Context, Black Iron Trio, Taiji Pole and more.
As a child, Philadelphia native Dave Wayne was captivated by music thanks to his older brother who introduced him to the sounds of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Muddy Waters, Gary Burton and Jimi Hendrix. Essentially self-taught on drums, and formally educated as a geologist, Dave moved to New Mexico in 1993. Since then, he has played with a number of innovative and accomplished NM-based artists including tuba-player Mark Weaver, bassists Zimbabwe Nkenya, Noah Baumeister, Casey A. Andersen and Ben Wright, cornetist Daniel Pearlman, saxophonists Chris Jonas and Alex Murzyn, pianists Robert Muller and Joseph Salack, poets Robert Winson and Mark Weber, and guitarists Mustafa Stefan Dill, Sean Buckley, Tim "Tiger" Gagan, and Ross Hamlin. In 2009 he formed his own band – The Things That Are Heard – in order to "air out my own half-baked ideas concerning the relationship between composition and improvisation in music.”
While resident in Santa Fe, Dave has had numerous opportunities to perform and record with touring improvisors such as cornettist Dan Clucas, keyboardists Thollem McDonas and Brian Haas, guitarist Jeff Platz, saxophonists Andrew Lamb, Rob Brown, Alan Lechusza and Joshua Smith, trombonist Michael Vlatkovich and bassist Clyde Reed. Through these encounters, Dave has developed great stylistic flexibility which permits him to transgress numerous musical boundaries in a single performance. His percussing has been documented on a fistful of albums, both privately issued and on labels such as pfMENTUM, Amirani, Plutonium, Snowdonia, and Zerx. He's currently working with several ensembles playing hip-hop / funk ("Shake Alert"), Middle Eastern fusion ("Love Unfold The Sun"), and modern jazz (“OrnEtc.”). In addition to playing music, he’s written about music for
AllAboutJazz.com, is a husband, father and homeowner, works full-time as a scientist and maintains a collection of approximately 9000 records and CDs.
