Dave Rempis & Avreeayl Ra
Saxophonist, improviser, and composer Dave Rempis has been an integral part of the thriving Chicago jazz and improvised music scene since 1997. Chicago master drummer / percussionist Avreeayl Ra is a renowned musician always in demand among visiting jazz artists in Chicago.
Watch the Duo’s Performance
Dave Rempis, Saxophones
Saxophonist, improviser, and composer Dave Rempis has been an integral part of the thriving Chicago jazz and improvised music scene since 1997. With a background in ethnomusicology and African studies at Northwestern University, including a year spent at the University of Ghana, Rempis burst onto the creative music scene at the age of 22 when he was asked to join the now-legendary Chicago jazz outfit The Vandermark Five. This opportunity catapulted him to notoriety as he began to tour regularly throughout the US and Europe, an active schedule that he still maintains to the present day. At the same time, Rempis began to develop the many Chicago-based groups for which he’s currently known, including The Rempis Percussion Quartet, The Engines, Ballister, Rempis/Abrams/Ra, Wheelhouse, Triage, The Rempis/Rosaly Duo, and The Rempis/Daisy Duo. Other collaborations have included work with Paul Lytton, Fred Anderson, Peter Brötzmann, Hamid Drake, Tomeka Reid, Steve Swell, Elisabeth Harnik, John Tchicai, Roscoe Mitchell, Nate Wooley, Jaimie Branch, Kevin Drumm, Paal Nilssen-Love, Nels Cline, and Joe McPhee. In 2013, he started his own record label, Aerophonic Records, to document this ongoing work. Rempis has been named regularly since 2006 in the annual Downbeat Critics’s Poll as a “rising star” on both alto and baritone saxophone, a category that he won in 2017. He’s received funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jazz Road Touring sponsored by the Doris Duke and Andrew Mellon Foundations, the City of Chicago Individual Artist Program, and was the recipient of a Ragdale Fellowship from the Herb Alpert Foundation in 2017.
Rempis’ musical expression draws on a number of touchstones. While heavily improvisational in nature, his Greek ethnicity, studies in jazz and ethnomusicology, an appreciation for the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary composition, and a love for unforgivingly strident yelps, screeches, and squeals that can encompass the ever-evolving state of human depravity all inform his work.
Aside from his work as a musician and composer, Rempis has worked tirelessly as a presenter. Since 2002, he’s curated and produced a weekly series of improvised music at Chicago’s Elastic Arts Foundation, where he’s also served as Board President since 2015. He was a founding member of the presenters’ collective Umbrella Music, and one of the lead producers and curators of its annual festival of improvised music from 2006-2014. He was business manager of the world renowned Pitchfork Music Festival from 2005-2016, and now works as Operations Manager with the neighborhood-based Hyde Park Jazz Festival in Chicago. He also serves on the Curatorial Board of the Ragdale Foundation.
Avreeayl Ra, Drummer
Chicago master drummer / percussionist Avreeayl Ra was born in Chicago in 1947 and still lives there today. He is a renowned musician always in demand among visiting jazz artists in Chicago. Avreeayl’s father, Arthur “Swinglee” O’Neil, was a tenor saxophonist who mentored many young Chicago musicians, including John Gilmore, later the mainstay of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Avreeayl is a long-term member of the Chicago AACM, his relationship with the seminal music organization having begun with early studies with AACM co-founder Kelan Philip Cohran. Avreeayl has performed and /or recorded with Fred Anderson, Amiri Baraka, Fontella Bass, Lester Bowie, Ari Brown, Oscar Brown, Jr., Henry Butler, Henry Byrd (”Professor Longhair”), Hamid Drake, Malachi Favors, Donald Raphael Garrett, Charles Gayle, Henry Grimes, Billy Harper, Joseph Jarman, Edward “Kidd” Jordan, Nicole Mitchell, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Malachi Thompson, and many more.
The venerable “Chicago Tribune” music critic Howard Reich wrote recently, “An indispensable Chicago innovator, Avreeayl Ra shapes the music-making swirling around him with remarkable precision and poise... extraordinarily sensitive percussion.” Critic John Kelman has described Avreeayl’s playing as “part Tony Williams, part Elvin Jones, and all Avreeayl Ra.” Avreeayl considers himself greatly blessed to have come up in the richly progressive Chicago “avant-garde” jazz community. Though he has lived briefly in New Orleans and New York and has toured widely in the U.S., Canada, Europe, the Far East, and Africa, he has always returned home to live in Chicago. These days Avreeayl devotes much of his time and phenomenal energy to documenting on film the hidden spiritual roots of Chicago music, focusing on the Congo Beach Initiative (inspired by Congo Beach in New Orleans), a drum- and spirit-centered society in which Chicago musicians, dancers, and artists of all descriptions, young and elders alike, have congregated for many years at 63rd Street and Lakefront, playing music and practicing their spiritual and healing arts throughout the night, while developing an undying, evolving, spontaneous, organic communal life based in the rhythms, sounds, images, and spirituality of the African-American soul. Avreeayl is also documenting the Chicago jazz community, in particular life stories of the elders in the music. Another Avreeayl Ra project is the study and documentation of modalities for healing and spiritual balance, both inside and outside the music.