Exposure by Silke Eberhard / Dave Rempis / Kent Kessler / Mike Reed

This live recording was made at Elastic Arts in Chicago as part of the yearly Exposure Series, an event that brings underknown and underrepresented artists to Chicago to introduce them to audiences while also giving them the opportunity to work intensively with their Chicago-based counterparts over several days and in several different performance contexts. For the 2017 incarnation, renowned German saxophonist Silke Eberhard was the special guest, and performed in a trio with Jim Baker and Fred Lonberg-Holm, an octet with Katherine Young, Josh Berman, Jason Stein, Macie Stewart, Paul Giallorenzo, Jason Roebke, and Phil Sudderberg, and in this free-blowing quartet with Rempis, Kessler, and Reed. This set was a particular highlight of the event, with the longstanding connections between the three Chicagoans providing the perfect springboard for Eberhard to bounce off. As a front line, she and Rempis proved to be completely simpatico - knowing how to lay back, how to tease interweaving lines from one another, and how to dive in on a full-on burn when needed. And Kessler and Reed as always prove to be the perfect accompanists. Both are seasoned musicians who approach free-improvised contexts with keen intelligence, giving particular attention to form and structure, while always exercising shrewd judgement in terms of how to drive any given piece forward. They know when to give their bandmates a slight push, or take a breath and let the resulting space speak for itself. This was a first-meeting encounter that provides a great insight into improvised music as a global language, whose many various dialects are often quite compatible.