Edition Redux is the most recent of Ken Vandermark’s ensembles, adding to the MacArthur Prize winner’s internationally and critically acclaimed series of bands which include The Vandermark 5, FME, The Territory Band, The Resonance Ensemble, Entr’acte, Made To Break, and Marker. In addition to Vandermark, who plays saxophones and clarinet with the group, this quartet is composed of Erez Dessel (keyboards), Lily Finnegan (drums), and Beth McDonald (tuba/electronics), who represent the next wave of Chicago’s creative music scene.
The music of Edition Redux includes the range of Vandermark’s interests and influences, incorporating the experimental jazz of the AACM; the different schools of improvised music developed in England, Netherlands, and Germany; post-punk, Tropicalia, dub, and funk. The band presented its music for the first time during a U.S. tour in April of 2023, and recorded its initial album, Better A Rook Than A Pawn (Audiographic Records) at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago immediately following that series of concerts. Called “Essential New Music,” by Magnet Magazine and picked as one of “The Best Jazz on Bandcamp, January 2024,” this recording was released to coincide with a trip to Europe for a series of performances by the ensemble in October of the same year. Edition Redux will tour in the States during February of 2024 to develop new material for its next album and will return to Europe for concerts in November where the band will be a featured group on the Wels Music Unlimited Festival.
Erez Dessel
Is an improviser, pianist, composer, and educator. After winning multiple Downbeat Student Music Awards, Dessel moved to Boston to study at the New England Conservatory of Music (NEC), where he worked with a host of jazz luminaries, including Billy Hart, Ethan Iverson, and Jason Moran. While in Boston he performed regularly, including at the Celebrity Series festival Jazz Along the Charles, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Wally’s Jazz Club. As an educator, he led his quartet to perform and teach in over 50 workshops in the Boston area and was also selected to bring his group to the Virginia Arts Festival to lead a week of masterclasses in public schools and community spaces. After graduating from NEC in 2020, Dessel moved to Savannah, GA to accept the position of music director at the Savannah Music Festival Jazz Academy, Savannah’s first and only free after-school youth jazz program. While in Georgia he performed regularly around the South in arts spaces in Atlanta, Columbia SC, and Asheville NC, as well as debuting his hour-long solo improvisation and multimedia piece “Residue” at the Savannah Cultural Arts Center. He currently lives in Chicago, where he’s been lucky enough to play with a host of improvising musicians at venues indulging the Hungry Brain and Elastic Arts. Dessel’s music is centered around exploring improvisation, graphic notation, and polyrhythmic structures. He frequently works with cassette tapes and is currently developing ways to paint with the piano using charcoal, pastel, paper, and linen.
Lily Finnegan
Lily Glick Finnegan is a Chicago born and based drummer, composer, improviser, and organizer. This year she was featured in the Chicago Reader as a “Chicagoan of Note”. This fall she is releasing her first trio album featuring all original compositions. She is a member of Edition Redux, a new ensemble featuring Ken Vandermark, Erez Dessel, and Beth McDonald. She has collaborated with artists including Macie Stewart, gabby fluke-mogul, Ken Vandermark, Shanta Nurullah, Dave Rempis, Ben Lamar Gay, Devon Gates, Ed Wilkerson, Lia Kohl, Katinka Kleijn, Fred Jackson, Jason Stein, Christof Kurzmann, and Katie Ernst.
In 2021 she completed a Master of Music from Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. She received a full scholarship to participate in the Berklee Global Jazz Institute. In addition, she was part of the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. Here she was mentored by Terri Lyne Carrington, Kris Davis, and Linda May Han Oh. Her thesis project was entitled “Music and Abolition: Creating a World Without Policing- Music’s Role in Imagination, Experimentation, and Collectivity”. Prior she earned a Bachelor of Arts double major from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in sociology and music.
She is one of the curators of the Option Series, a showcase of contemporary approaches to improvisation and composition held at Experimental Sound Studio. Lily works for the independent music cooperative Catalytic Sound as the record store manager and festival organizer. In 2023 she was nominated as one of the Next Jazz Legacy semifinalists.
Beth McDonald
Is a classically trained tuba player gone awry. She performs mainly as an improviser, using the tuba acoustically and with electronic effects pedals. Densing (2021), her most recent album, uses tuba and electronics in conjunction with natural acoustic resonance to build up unpredictable new layers of sound. The CD version of the album was packaged in handmade felted wool, which was created through an analogous physical process of layering. Beth’s next solo album, a continuation and expansion of the Densing project, will be released in mid-2023.
While the pandemic put many of her musical projects on pause, collaboration is an integral part of Beth’s musical practice – working with musicians as well as with artists and performers in other mediums. Some notable past collaborators include Becky Grajeda, Ethan T. Parcell, Sasha de Koninck, Eli Wallace, Isaac Turner, Franki Hand, Matt Samolis, Ben Zucker, Nathanael Lee Jones, and Mark Booth.
In a previous musical life, Beth toured as a contemporary classical musician, chamber musician, and soloist. She also participated in orchestral academies at the Lucerne Festival, Aspen Music Festival, and the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, and was on staff at the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice. Beth holds degrees from New England Conservatory, Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Kentucky.
Ken Vandermark
Ken Vandermark (USA 1964) Ken Vandermark (USA 1964) is an avant-garde composer, improviser, saxophonist/clarinetist, curator, and writer; director of the Catalytic Sound musician cooperative since 2012, has run Audiographic Records since 2014; in 1999 was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in music. He moved to Chicago from Boston in 1989 and has worked continuously from the early 1990s onward, both as a performer and organizer in North America, Europe, Latin America, Japan, and Ethiopia, recording in a large array of contexts, with many internationally renowned musicians.
His current group activity includes the bands Edition Redux, Lean Left, The DKV Trio, DEK, his large ensemble Entr’acte, the ongoing Momentum projects; duos with Terrie Ex, Christof Kurzmann, Damon Locks, Paal Nilssen-Love, Mars Williams, and Nate Wooley; and work as a solo performer. Ken co-founded Catalytic Sound in 2012, an organization dedicated to the economic sustainability of creative improvising musicians and has been its director since then. In 2014 he began Audiographic Records, an independent music label. Since June of 2015 Ken has been co-curator of Option, a music and interview series held at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Half of each year is spent touring in Europe, North America, Latin America, and Japan; his concerts and numerous recordings have been critically acclaimed at home and abroad.
