Community Mondays: Fil Am Futurism with Karl Evangelista and Grex

Filipino-American guitarist/composer Karl Evangelista presents an evening of daring, contemporary compositions, experimental sounds, and jazz-inflected improvisations, joined by Oakland-based AAPI trio Grex. The group performs selections from Grex's "Auntie + Tebs," a brand new album focused on revolutionary action in the Philippines and South Africa. Karl Evangelista ranks among the vanguard of musicians pushing the traditions of jazz and experimental music into the future. Signal to Noise magazine hails Evangelista as "one of the most original instrumentalists and composers of his generation," and as the creative force behind boundary-breaking group Grex, Evangelista's music has been called “essential current-and-future listening” (Tiny Mix Tapes). Evangelista has explored new realms in sound and intercultural collaboration alongside the likes of Andrew Cyrille, Fred Frith, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Trevor Watts, Bobby Bradford, Alexander Hawkins, Tatsu Aoki, and Asian Improv aRts co-founder Francis Wong. Grex is an experimental/art rock band based out of Oakland, California. In biological terms, a "grex" is an entity composed of several smaller organisms. Grex (the band) explores the meeting point between surreal songcraft and the dark outer reaches of free jazz and industrial hip-hop. The group has been called an "otherworldly experience" (Eugene Weekly) and "true genre warping music" (KFJC), recalling at turns the ecstatic energy of Milford Graves, the electronic squall of Death Grips, and the lilting indie rock of Water from Your Eyes and Mitski. Grex has performed alongside the likes of Fred Frith, Andrew Cyrille, Tony Levin, and members of Irreversible Entanglements, Tune-Yards, and Dirty Projectors.