The 2024 Instigation Festival celebrates its ninth year with three days of improvised music collaborations in New Orleans featuring 15+ Chicago / New Orleans performers. This year’s festival will be based around the genre-defying new project from Chicago legend Mike Reed - The Separatist Party.
The members of the Separatist Party reflect a wide breadth of Chicago’s innovative contributions to the music world: Marvin Tate [vocals, poetry] decades long influence in the spoken word and poetry community, Ben LaMar Gay’s [cornet, voice, electronics] singular approach to storytelling through sound, stalwarts of the ambient, drone and psychedelic scenes the Bitchin Bajas [Rob Frye (reeds, electronics), Cooper Crain (guitar), Dan Quinlivan (keyboards)] and Reed (drums, compositions) himself, whose commitment to keeping creative arts vital and vibrant in Chicago through his music making and concert organizing has been a guiding light to the Instigation Festival since its inception.
New Orleans will be represented by a cross-generational pool of performers who have reshaped their city’s sounds and cast an influence far beyond the parish borders. Helen Gillet (loops, cello, voice), Sasha Masakowski (voice, electronics), Emily Mikesell (trumpet, electronics), Martin Kruche (saxophones), Byron Asher (saxophone, electronics), Doug Garrison (drums), Rex Gregory (saxophones, flutes, electronics), Dan Oestreicher (saxophones), Paul Thibodeaux (drums), Aurora Nealand (saxophones, voice, electronics, accordion) and Rotten Milk (guitar, electronics) will perform in small groups with the members of Separatist Party continuing the festival’s commitment to forging new and exciting ensembles through first time improvised meetings. The festival will also host a EP release show by renowned ambient artist MJ Guider augmented by Separatist Party collaborators. Guider’s seminal work on the Kranky label and connection to other strains of improvised performance will bring new artists and audiences into the Instigation community. This kind of cross-pollination – similar to the halcyon days of the Empty Bottle in the late 1990s when improvised music, post-rock, experimental and ambient musicians freely mingled, creating some of the most singular music that still defines our city – charts a path toward sustainability and growth as the festival approaches the start of its second decade. An integral tenant of the festival is to work with the series and organizations that provide year-round space for the New Orleans creative arts community.
The goal of Instigation Festival since its inception has been to build connections between the deep and highly eclectic improvising arts communities in Chicago and New Orleans. Original Instigators Steve Marquette and Marie Casimir have managed to bring together an incredible assortment of musicians and movement artists since 2016 for singular experiences in venues in both cities.
