“Exciting…” —THE NEW YORKER

“LOVE IT” —NEWSWEEK

“A dynamic collective…” —THE NEW YORK TIMES

“A brash, buoyant combo…” —TIME OUT NEW YORK

“…A group that has created one of the most compelling recordings of the year….[Respect] plays with a stellar blend of precision and humor.” —THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“[Respect] challenges and instigates. It delightfully confounds. This is world-class American jazz at its finest and freest. It’s pure truth. Respect the truth.” —CITY NEWSPAPER



FORMED IN 2001, The Respect Sextet is a powerhouse ensemble dedicated to performing a wide variety of improvisational musics. Relying on their explosive energy, rare telepathy, outstanding musicianship, and a deep friendship, Respect pieces together free improvisations, original compositions, free jazz classics, television commercial jingles, text pieces, jazz standards, game pieces and more into “a whirling collage,” shouts Exclaim! Magazine, “that ransacks and reshapes the entire jazz tradition, from New Orleans march to Misha Mengelberg, Sun Ra to Charlie Parker.” Named “one of the best and most ambitious new ensembles in jazz” by Signal to Noise,

The Respect Sextet continues—after nearly a decade as a collective—to fearlessly push the envelope.

Respect’s newest release, Sirius Respect: The Respect Sextet play the music of Sun Ra & Stockhausen, (Mode/Avant, 2009), was called “one of the most compelling recordings of the year” by the Wall Street Journal and filed under “Love It” in Newsweek Magazine (“an out-of-this-world pairing”). Sirius Respect brings together the music of Sun Ra and Karlheinz Stockhausen and views them through Respect-colored glasses. Pieces ranging from Stockhausen’s “Tierkreis” (inspired by the Zodiac) to Sun Ra’s “Saturn” are juxtaposed, layered, deconstructed and re-assembled. “It’s neither jazz nor classical,” says John Schaefer of WNYC’s Soundcheck, “but something cosmically both.”

The group comprises Eli Asher (trumpet, toys), James Hirschfeld (trombone, jamespectronics, toys), Malcolm Kirby (bass), Ted Poor (drums), Josh Rutner (reeds, radio, toys), and Red Wierenga (piano, keyboard, accordion, redspectronics).

Through its eclecticism, humor, devotion to improvisation, predilection towards swing, and its use of toys and “little instruments,” The Respect Sextet has drawn comparisons both to New Dutch Swing and the AACM. Many dialectics are at work (and play) in Respect’s world, in which the serious, heady, and intellectual mingle with the light, comic, and absurd, where compositions alternate and mesh with improvisations, and where tight ensemble work coexists with loose, empathic interplay.



Listen: The Respect Sextet, "In the Shadow of My Bier"

Praised for its "powerhouse playing" by the Chicago Sun-Times, the JACK Quartet maintains a steady appetite for today's most demanding string quartet repertoire. Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Kevin McFarland, the quartet has given high-energy performances in Europe and North America including appearances at Carnegie Hall, La Biennale di Venezia, the Lucerne Festival, and the Festival Internacional de Musica Contemporanea de Michoacan. The members of the quartet met while attending the Eastman School of Music, where in addition to learning standard and contemporary repertoire they pursued period, non-western, and popular performance styles. The quartet has studied with the Arditti Quartet at the Pro-Bio Foundation Summer School for Contemporary Quartet Music, the Kronos Quartet at the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall, and members of the Ensemble Intercontemporain at the Lucerne Festival Academy. The commissioning and performance of new works for string quartet is integral to the JACK Quartet's mission, leading them to work closely with composers Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm, Matthias Pintscher, Aaron Cassidy, Aaron Travers, Roberto Rusconi, Cristian Amigo, Robert Wannamaker, Randall Woolf, Kirsten Broberg, Alexandra du Bois, and Samuel Adler. The quartet has worked with composition students at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in Italy for the Intrasonus Project. In addition to working with composers and performers, the JACK quartet seeks to broaden and diversify the potential audience for new music through educational presentations designed for a variety of ages, backgrounds, and levels of musical experience.