No Idea Residency #1
Ken Vandermark + Mabel Kwan
May 29-30, 2025
The inaugural No Idea Residency brings Chicago improvisers Ken Vandermark and Mabel Kwan to Austin for 2 days of wide-ranging activities including: an Artist Talk, Open Rehearsal/Masterclass, film screening of Daniel Kraus' 2007 documentary on Vandermark entitled Musician, and numerous performances spanning new, first-time meetings with Texas artists, a premiere duo collaboration between Vandermark and Kwan, and a night featuring the music of legendary AACM member Fred Anderson and Texas great Dennis González.
Thursday, May 29
7pm: Film screening of Daniel Kraus’ Work Series #2: Musician
58 mins, 2007
Daniel Krauss’ film, Musician, works with a similar methodology as Frederick Wiseman—no voice overs, no talking heads—letting the camera capture events as they unfold in real time. Though Ken Vandermark is at the center of the action, he is not the subject of the film. Instead, the subject is the work it takes for every musician, whatever genre, to get their material onstage and is a one-of-a-kind document of this process.
8pm: Mabel Kwan + Ken Vandermark Duo
Mabel Kwan and Ken Vandermark have worked together in various formats, including projects with the new music group Ensemble Dal Niente featuring new work by Roscoe Mitchell, Last Trane to Clover Five (2021), and performances at Big Ears Festival (2022). Since then they have played together in various improvised music groups; this will be their first concert as a duo.
9:15pm: Panel Discussion and Artist Talk
Vandermark’s resoluteness in managing innumerable projects functions as a springboard to investigate and understand the complexities of establishing and maintaining a creative life in music. Panel members represent different aspects of Ken's sprawling work as musician, label owner (Audiographic Records since 2014), Director of the Catalytic Sound musician cooperative (since 2012), concert presenter (Catalytic Sound Festival since 2020), and writer.
Ken Vandermark
- musician
Mabel Kwan
- musician
Eric Drott
- Professor at UT Butler School of Music and author of Streaming Music,
Streaming Capital (Duke Press)
Pedro Moreno
- Founder of Epistrophy Arts, a grass-roots organization dedicated to
presenting the finest in improvised music and adventurous jazz in Austin
Texas since 1998.
+ more TBA
Friday, May 30, 5-7pm
Open Rehearsal + Master Class with Ken Vandermark
Ken Vandermark leads a 2-hour open rehearsal with his quartet of Texas musicians workshopping music to be performed this evening. Ample time will be left for audience questions about Vandermark’s working process as composer, improvisor, and bandleader.
Friday, May 30, 7:30pm
Set 1: Mabel Kwan + Juan García duo
First-time free improvisations between two acclaimed artists investigating the peripheries of contemporary classical, improvised, and experimental music.
Mabel Kwan - piano
Juan García - double bass
Set 2: Ken Vandermark Texas Ensemble
Ken Vandermark presents new compositions exploring distinct melodic, rhythmic and architectural strategies for improvisers. Vandermark will work with Texas musicians Jonathan Horne (Austin), Matthew Frerck (Denton), Stefan González (Denton), and Kory Cook (San Antonio) in a debut collaboration.
Ken Vandermark - tenor saxophone, Bb clarinet
Jonathan Horne - electric guitar
Matthew Frerck - double bass
Stefan González - vibraphone
Kory Cook - drumset
Friday, May 30, 10:00pm
The music of Fred Anderson + Dennis González
The music of legendary musician Fred Anderson, a founding member of the AACM and a mentor for numerous musicians, is rarely heard outside of Chicago. Vandermark was fortunate enough to work with Anderson on a regular basis, record an album of his compositions with the DKV Trio, as well as feature Anderson as a guest soloist on the Territory Band album, Collide (2007). Vandermark will present a selection of Fred Anderson's pieces in a trio with North Texas musicians Stefan González and Matthew Frerck.
The trio will also perform selections of music from Dallas’ pioneering trumpeter, artist and educator Dennis González. González established the Dallas Association for Avant-Garde and Neo Impressionistic Music (daagnim) in the late 1970s, at the suggestion of Anthony Braxton and Art Lande. The daagnim organization, which functioned both as a group of musicians and as a record label, was based on and named after Chicago's AACM. Dennis’ youngest child, drummer and vibraphonist Stefan González, will present selections of their father’s music heavily influenced by his work with Chicago colleagues Malachi Favors and Alvin Fielder (via Mississippi), among others.
Ken Vandermark - tenor saxophone, Bb clarinet
Matthew Frerck - double bass
Stefan González - drumset
Ken Vandermark
Ken Vandermark (USA 1964) is an avant-garde composer, improviser, saxophonist/clarinetist, curator, and writer; in 1999 was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in music. He moved to Chicago from Boston in 1989 and has worked continuously from the early 1990s onward, both as a performer and organizer in North America, Europe, Latin America, Japan, and Ethiopia, recording in a large array of contexts, with many internationally renowned musicians (such as Fred Anderson, Ab Baars, Martin Blume, Peter Brötzmann, Sylvie Courvoisier, Tim Daisy, Kris Davis, Dieb 13, Hamid Drake, Terrie Ex, Mats Gustafsson, Elisabeth Harnik, Steve Heather, Didi Kern, Kent Kessler, Christof Kurzmann, Thomas Lehn, Paul Lytton, Joe McPhee, Andy Moor, Jason Moran, Ikue Mori, Joe Morris, Matthias Muche, Paal Nilssen-Love, Eddie Prevóst, Mette Rasmussen, Tom Rainey, Eric Revis, Jasper Stadhouders, Chad Taylor, John Tilbury, Mars Williams, and Nate Wooley).
His current group activity includes the bands Edition Redux, Lean Left, The DKV Trio, DEK, his large ensemble Entr’acte, the ongoing Momentum projects; duos with Terrie Ex, Christof Kurzmann, Damon Locks, Paal Nilssen-Love, Mars Williams, and Nate Wooley; and work as a solo performer. Ken co-founded Catalytic Sound in 2012, an organization dedicated to the economic sustainability of creative improvising musicians, and since then has been its director. In 2014 he began Audiographic Records, an independent music label. Since June of 2015 Ken has been co-curator of Option, a music and interview series held at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Half of each year is spent touring in Europe, North America, Latin America, and Japan; his concerts and numerous recordings have been critically acclaimed at home and abroad. Ken’s activity as a writer includes liner notes for a variety of recordings, and contributions to the eighth edition of John Zorn’s Arcana: musicians on music, the music journal Sound American, the Spanish language periodical “El Estado Mental,” and “Catalytic Quarterly.”
Mabel Kwan
Pianist Mabel Kwan is fascinated by sounds, contradictions, and our perception of what is familiar or strange. She plays keys, synth, or accordion with STOMACHS, Honestly Same, Em Spel, the Jason Roebke Quartet, the Christopher Dammann Sextet, Kwan/Pauly/Shaw trio and Ensemble Dal Niente. Mabel frequently collaborates with dancer and choreographer Ayako Kato, and with pianist Sharon Udoh. She is a 2017 3 Arts Awardee, 2018 High Concept Labs Artist, and a 2020 City of Chicago Esteemed Artist. A native of Austin, Texas, Mabel received piano performance degrees from Rice University and Northern Illinois University. She enjoys writing letters, reading comics, and camping with friends and family.
This project is supported in part by the City of Austin Economic Development Department.