Performance: The Bridge #2.1

The Bridge intends to form such a network for exchange, production, and diffusion, to build a transatlantic bridge that will be crossed on a regular basis by French and American musicians as part of collaborative projects. And, in addition to the scheduled projects, encourage meetings and relationships between creative musicians and perpetuate them. In other words: to give them the times and spaces to join and rejoin on both sides of the ocean and to deepen their exchanges.

The Bridge #2.1 includes:

Christiane Bopp - trombone, voice

Rob Frye - woodwinds, percussion

JayVe Montgomery - woodwinds, electronics

Simon Sieger - accordion, tuba, trombone

Dan Bitney - drums, electronics

About the artists:

Dan Bitney is an experimental musician and composer based in Chicago. A multi-instrumentalist, Bitney works within avant-garde electronic, rock and improvisational groups, most notably Tortoise, Isotope 217 and Spectralina.

Christiane Bopp is a french trombone and sackbut player. She studied at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris . She's active since 1997 in early music. For a long time she has found in contemporary and creative music a privileged space for expression.

She currently performs in Joëlle Leandre's tentet « Can you hear me ? Her interest in the interdisciplinary has led her to collaborate with poets during performances and to creating projects such as the quartet Tenements of clover on the Bee in poems of Emily Dickinson, and the cine-concert “Meshes of Times” on Maya Deren's films, (a duo with musician and filmmaker Lucie Mousset ).

Rob Frye was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri and grew up in St. Louis where he began playing guitar and saxophone. he moved to Chicago in 2006 to attend DePaul University’s school of music where he graduated in 2010. since then he has pursued the muse of sound along with the rest of the artistic community embedded in Chicago. He alternates his summers between working as a field biologist for the Institute for Bird Populations in California and as a counselor/resident artist for Chicago park district’s culture arts and nature programs. With synthesizer, flute, saxophone, clarinet, guitar and drum, Rob Frye is present in the bands Bitchin Bajas, Cave, el is a sound of joy, and, with his own project flux bikes, he also uses his bicycle as an instrument.

Of Jamaican and Louisiana Creole descent, JavVe Montgomery was born in Ft. Hood, Texas on the last day of 1979 and raised a dependent of the department of defense in Berlin, Germany, before and after the wall; Rayne, Louisiana, before the frogs left; Columbia, SC, home of the confederate flag; and Ft. Campbell, KY, home of the 101st Airborne Division.

Montgomery received a double BA in Japanese Studies and Anthropology from Centre College of KY and has also studied sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is Senior Program Specialist for the Chicago Park District’s Inferno Mobile Recording Studio, a hip hop revitalization program.

Born in 1986, Simon Sieger spent his early childhood in Briey-en-forêt. His father, a saxophonist and actor in the region's jazz and free jazz scene, taught him the basics of music and improvisation from the age of four. At the age of nine, Simon's parents moved to India and it was there that he completed his knowledge of jazz, classical and world music. Once the baccalaureate was in his pocket, Simon decided to try his luck in France. He landed in Marseille, where, playing the trombone under a highway, he was immediately hired by a French song group. He quickly met musicians from the Marseilles scene, notably Jean-Marc Montera and Ahmad Compaoré, during his musicology studies at the Faculty of Aix-Marseille. Simon Sieger is active as a musicology researcher (currently in doctoral studies under the direction of Christine Esclapez), jazz musician (with the Nine Spirit Company) and cultural pioneer in various and impromptu groups.