Sonic Explorations in Troy

About this event

Troy Savings Bank Music Hall is delighted to announce that Improv Spaces will be artists-in-residence and working on a collaborative incubator project with artists from the Capital region that will be workshopped with the public and then premiered at the Improv Spaces Music Festival.

Improv Spaces co-directors, harpist Alex Chang and percussionist Adam Forman, are a part of the Rock City Falls Trio (Alex Chang, harp; Jason Handron, double bass; and Adam Forman, drums) and will be working with multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Manuel J. Perez III to create a collaborative work-in-progress they hope to develop with participants from the Troy community.  The artists hope to incorporate our collective joys, trials, and experiences of the city into a music and visual art project. 

The incubator project will be presented as a live performance of the work-in-progress at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall on Tuesday, February 25th, 2025 at 7pm for feedback that will be open to the public. The piece will then debut at the 2025 Improv Spaces Music Festival on Saturday, June 7th at the Round Lake Auditorium.

About Improv Spaces

Co-founded by harpist Alex Chang and percussionist Adam Forman, Improv Spaces is a non-profit that serves as a hub in the Saratoga/Capital region to provide resources for improvisational music and interdisciplinary collaborations. The organization also seeks to introduce the practice of improvisation to the general public through site-specific work with live performance, collaborative projects, and performative workshops.

About the Artists

The Rock City Falls Trio (Alex Chang, harp; Jason Handron, double bass; and Adam Forman, drums) is a cross-genre improvisation-based music ensemble based in the Capital Region. The trio often works with interdisciplinary collaborators including for their performances of EQUILIBRIUM. A collaborative improv with artist Christian A. Mendoza (2023) and WATER. A collaborative improv with artist Michael Miyahira aka Mike Ming (2024)

Alex Chang is an electric acoustic harpist and composer. Her musical practice finds its foundations in free jazz, indie rock, Celtic and new music, and her classical training. She explores entanglements and embodied practices through the concepts of free jazz and improvisation and the ways in which music moves through us and puts us in relation and dialogue with others. Her interest in collaborative practices attends to how improvisation opens up our sentience, our emotional and empathic relations around us and beyond as intertwined beings for connection and healing. Her work often focuses on the arts and environment and centering BIPOC communities. 

She is part of the Rock City Falls Trio, a cross-genre ensemble that often works interdisciplinarily through collaborative improvisation. WATER. A collaborative improv, which premiered at the 2024 Improv Spaces Music Festival, presented three movements performed by the improvisational trio featuring original themes composed by Chang. She recently completed a Jazz and Sonic Arts Music residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and premiered a new work Sharing a Woven Melody at the 2024 Gather Listen Hear Summer Arts Festival Jazz and Sonic Arts Concert. @alexachang2000

(Photo credit: Jessica Tomaselli)

Jason Handron (b.1995) is a composer and bassist from Albany, NY. He has been featured as both a composer and performer at events such as the soundSCAPE Festival (Maccagno, Italy) and the New Music Gathering (Boston, MA). He currently performs with the Rock City Falls trio and teaches private lessons in the NY Capital Region.

Jason holds a B.M. in Music Composition from the State University of New York at Fredonia and an M.M. in Music Composition from Bowling Green State University.

Adam Forman is a classically trained drummer/percussionist who has performed in a wide range of musical settings. He has worked with composer/director/multi- instrumentalist Joe Fee and innovative collective IKTUS Percussion. His deep focus on improvisational practice and sensibilities allows for inventive syntheses of his experiences in experimental musical performance, including his punk and indie-rock influenced work.

In addition, he has rich experience working in collaborative experimental performance and interdisciplinary practices with music, improvisation across genres, and with the administrative aspects of running musical spaces and the creative musical direction of ensembles. While a manager at the legendary Carroll Music studios in New York, he spent years organizing large scale orchestral concerts and Broadway productions as well as working closely with experimental chamber ensembles and touring bands.

He has significant performance experience including at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in Austin, Texas as a member of Talujon Percussion Quartet and with the Argento Chamber Ensemble, Fireworks Ensemble, and Greenwich Village Orchestra, as well as with the Manhattan Symphonie across China, and on large-scaled cruise ships and in theaters throughout New York City. He was also drummer for the bi-coastal band Butterscotch Stanley for more than a decade.

Recently he’s been exploring composing and rearranging music that would inspire unique, improvised-based performances. Adam’s arrangement of free jazz master Masahiko Togashi’s Pray was performed by the Rock City Falls Trio at their recent concert titled Equilibrium: a collaborative improv in September 2023.

Manuel J. Perez III (any pronouns) is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, performer, improviser, and researcher based in the northeastern USA. Treating all media, processes, and actions as generative vehicles of expression, their artwork integrates disciplines such as performance art, free improvisation, experimental composition, collage, datamoshing, architecture, poetry, artificial intelligence, and more. Their works often foreground the lived histories of everyday people as a means to investigate how ways of becoming and knowing are enabled through performativity, sociality, self-expression, and spontaneous action. They believe deeply in the power of togetherness, and prioritize the creation of art that encourages the development of community, empathy, and understanding of oneself and others.

Their artistic work has been shared internationally within the bland white walls of institutions such as Istanbul Bilgi University, Technische Universität Berlin, and Wesleyan University. They are a member/close collaborator of multiple spontaneous performance collectives, series, and venues around the United States (Fort Point Free Music; Dino Crisis; Structure Affliction; Colbish Circle; Troy Speakeasy; etc.), and prioritize working closely with communities that are new to improvisation and performance. Manuel has collaborated with folks such as Tyshawn Sorey, Wadada Leo Smith, Chris Pitsiokos, Nat Baldwin, Marc Edwards, David Berhman, TAK Ensemble, SPLICE Ensemble, Paula Matthusen, and Michael Century. As Death Rattled, their visual and sonic collage art thrives within DIY spontaneous performance communities worldwide.

This program is made possible in part by generous support from The Arts Center of the Capital Region, National Endowment for the Arts & New York State.