Todd Sickafoose and Jonny Rodgers duo @ Creative Music Guild Improvisation Summit

Todd Sickafoose and Jonny Rodgers play as a duo at Swan Dive on Wednesday, October 14, from 7 PM to 9 PM. The show is part of the Creative Music Guild Improvisation Summit, so it's an improvised set rather than a rehearsed program. If you're not familiar with the two, they come from very different musical worlds, and that's where the interest lies.

Sickafoose is a double bassist and a Tony and Grammy award-winning composer, producer, and arranger. He's spent two decades as a duo partner to folk poet and activist Ani DiFranco, with whom he's made ten albums and two concert DVDs over thousands of shows. He also worked on Anaïs Mitchell's folk opera Hadestown, which opened on Broadway in 2019 and won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Orchestrations for Sickafoose and Michael Chorney. He produced the show's 2020 Grammy-winning original cast recording, and his own band, Tiny Resistors, has played the North Sea Jazz, Stern Grove, and Angel City Jazz Festivals. Jazz Times has called his music "thoroughly original, endlessly creative," and Bassplayer described it as "stunningly brilliant."

Jonny Rodgers, who also records as Cindertalk, works with a completely different set of tools. He's known for coaxing eerie, electronically manipulated beauty out of tuned glass, so the evening puts a double bass and processed glass in the same room. With the Improvisation Summit context, the music is made on the spot rather than pulled from a record.

The show runs from 7 PM to 9 PM at Swan Dive, 727 SE Grand Ave in Portland. Admission is a suggested donation of $10 to $30 on a sliding scale.