Edition XL (Berman, Dessel, Finnigan, Macri, McDonald, Vandermark) & poets – Day 1
Announcing two special nights of music and poetry in Chicago! On Friday and Saturday, August 1st and 2nd, Ken Vandermark will be presenting his new ensemble, Edition XL, along with acclaimed poets, Kai Ihns, Ed Roberson, and Ken Taylor at the Green Mill. Each night will feature three sets of original music to be introduced by a short reading from one of the poets.
Edition XL is a sextet built on the foundation of Ken Vandermark’s critically acclaimed band, Edition Redux (with Erez Dessel: keyboards, Lily Finnegan: drums, Beth McDonald: tuba/electronics); a group that has toured both the States and Europe two times, was a featured band on the Festival Internacional Jazz Madrid and Music Unlimited 38 festival in Wels, Austria during November of 2024, and will be performing at the Sound & Gravity music festival in Chicago this September and the OCT-LOFT Jazz Festival in Shenzhen, China in October. The ensemble has released two albums, both with many accolades from music journalists: Better A Rook Than A Pawn (2023) and Broadcast Transformer (2025), both on Audiographic Records.
The larger group adds Josh Berman (cornet) and Nick Macri (acoustic & electric bass) to the fold and is much more than an expanded version of the quartet. Vandermark has created a completely new compositional system for this band, one that’s not only modular but also with parts that can be superimposed. It’s possible for each piece to stand alone, be collaged and/or stacked, giving an extraordinary number of permutations to the written material; music that has been influenced by the histories of free jazz, funk, and post-punk. In addition, the six musicians involved have extensive history with each other, working together in a variety of different configurations over the course of many years. All that musical experience and knowledge is brought to the table with Edition XL.
Kirsten Ihns grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and she earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first book is sundaey (Propeller Books, 2020), and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hyperallergic, Black Warrior Review, the Iowa Review, and Yalobusha Review. She is currently a PhD student and Neubauer Presidential Fellow in English Literature at the University of Chicago, where she studies texts that seem to want to be images, co-curates the emerging poet/artist series Plexiglas at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, and works for Chicago Review.
Ed Roberson studied painting in his youth and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh. His extensive travels inform his work, which is also influenced by spirituals and the blues, and by visual art, such as the mixed-media collages of Romare Bearden. Roberson’s honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2016, the Lila Wallace Writers’ Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, and the 2016 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. His work has been included in Best American Poetry. Words and phrases in Roberson’s experimental poetry actively resist parsing, using instead what Nathanial Mackey has called “double-jointed syntax” to explore and bend themes of race, history, and culture. “I’m not creating a new language. I’m just trying to un-White-Out the one we’ve got,” said Roberson in a 2006 interview with Chicago Postmodern Poetry. He lives in Chicago, where he has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, and Northwestern University.
Ken Taylor is the author of six books of poetry, three plays, and a collaboration with Ed Roberson titled found poem(s), a book of photography (Ken’s) and poetry (Ed’s) released by Corbett vs. Dempsey. He is the founder of selva oscura press, which he edits with Fred Moten.
Rehearsals with Edition XL began in February to prepare for this weekend residency at the legendary Green Mill of Chicago, an opportunity that Vandermark and the entire group takes with the highest regard. These are sure to be two extraordinary nights of music and poetry, and the concerts will be recorded for a future release on Audiographic Records.