Racer Session #495 | MANtrio - November 3, 2019

This week we’re excited to be hosting our friends MANtrio from Bellingham, WA! Drummer Melanie Sehman, pianist Sage Romey, and bassist Sarah Yates will come together to present composed improvisational pieces drawing on their backgrounds in contemporary classical music, medieval music, West African music, and early-mid 20th Century poetry.

MANTrio will play starting at 8pm, and after that we’ll transition into our weekly Sunday jam session. Please join us at Cafe Racer this Sunday to hear and see it all happen! In the mean time, some words on what to expect from MANtrio’s Melanie Sehman:

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“Sage, Sarah and I have known each other for a while and have performed with each other in different contexts, but we wanted a place of our own for creative exploration that was guided by the principle of radical listening. We started MANtrio this past summer with that in mind.

Radical listening is a practice that is used in many fields, but it is nothing new to improvisers. It is listening deeply, it is listening without judgement, it is listening with curiosity, it is listening that compels us to ask questions rather than answer them. With this principle as a foundation, we’ve drawn on our divergent musical backgrounds to compose new music, write and interpret graphic scores, incorporate text by some of our favorite writers and poets, arrange music that is meaningful to us and generally play around with projects that intrigue us. 

On Sunday we’ll be playing some of our favorite experiments to date. For the improvisation session to follow, we hope that the principle of radical listening will guide us all.”

-Melanie