Fred Frith, Simon Hanes, Max Jaffe, Jordan Glenn Quartet

Across multiple continents, scenes, and contexts, Fred Frith has been a wildly adventurous musician for nearly 60 years. From Henry Cow and Art Bears in England to Massacre and Keep the Dog in New York, from his expectation-exploding solo guitar sound to his idiosyncratic compositions for film and classical ensembles, Frith’s music has always sounded like little else. A key to his continued vitality has been his ever-renewing association with new musicians, whether on the downtown scene of New York in the early ’80s to his more recent links with legions of West Coast improvisers. A longtime teacher at Mills College, Frith has always been invested in what’s next for experimental music—and, in turn, investing himself in its development.

To that end, Frith brings another new quartet of younger and relentlessly interesting players to Big Ears, built by collaborating with the similarly energetic Simon Hanes. The percussionist Jordan Glenn, whose work with his own band BEAK is fascinating, also plays with Frith’s Fremakajo. After more than a decade of working in the experimental music community of New York, percussionist Max Jaffe relocated to the West Coast, where he’s found new partners like Patrick Shiroishi and Dave Harrington, as heard on 2024’s Speak, Moment. They will be joined by Hanes, a New York composer and improviser whose résumé stretches from work alongside John Zorn and the late, great Hal Wilner to a series of mighty noise projects. Hanes and Frith worked together to conceive this quartet. (Hanes presents his own epic composition, GARGANTUA, in Knoxville, too, and plays in his adventurous band, Tsons of Tsunami.) Big Ears is delighted to host so many new projects from Frith and Hanes, two musicians on their own endless quests for other horizons.