ROSENAU & SANBORN W/JOE WESTERLUND

Sun, Apr 05

6pm Doors 8pm Showtime Full food and beverage available for this show. 18+ $20 Adv (+fees/taxes) $27 Doors (+fees/taxes) Rosenau and Sanborn Bio: Bluebird began in 2015 at the inaugural Eaux Claires festival, when Nick Sanborn and his longtime friend and collaborator Chris Rosenau first stepped onstage together for an improvised duo set inside the sweltering geodesic dome known as The Channel. With no plan, years of shared musical history, and an electric crowd, a 20-minute idea stretched into nearly 50 — and sparked an ongoing collaboration. In October 2017, the two reconvened at a small house-studio in the woods of North Carolina, windows open to the warm air between Chapel Hill and Durham, and spent two days playing, improvising, and recording everything as it happened: rain falling, birds chirping, dogs barking, laughter and all. Rather than polish or reshape the material, they chose to preserve the weekend exactly as it was experienced — the original mixes, working titles, and atmosphere intact. The result is Bluebird: an unfiltered, deeply present document of friendship, spontaneity, and place, captured in real time and shared just as it unfolded. Under his own name, Joe Westerlund has emerged as an intuitive improviser and composer during the last decade, scoring deep meditative practice over the course of three full-length solo records. After all, Westerlund—a longtime student of Milford Graves—has now spent more than a quarter-century gleaning lessons from folk musicians and avant-garde icons, from close friends and challenging strangers alike. He served as the dynamic backbone of Megafaun, the North Carolina trio that he cofounded, and initiated collaborations with Arnold Dreyblatt, On Fillmore and Justin Vernon. As a session drummer, he has worked as the pulse beneath the plaintive Americana of Watchhouse, Daughter of Swords, and Jake Xerxes Fussell and been a textural anchor for the folk abstraction of Califone, The Dead Tongues and the synth-pop of Sylvan Esso. Most recently, he primarily tours and records in an improvisational trio, Setting (with Jaime Fennelly and Nathan Bowles), as a duo with trumpeter Trever Hagen, and as a solo artist on Psychic Hotline. His latest release, Curiosities from the Shift, is Westerlund’s definitive statement so far: a playful exploration driven by beats but not bound by them.