Peter Apfelbaum Hieroglyphics Quintet
PETER APFELBAUM HIEROGLYPHICS QUINTET
Live at LOOVE ANNEX — Saturday, August 8th
Doors 7:30 · Music 8:00 · $15
Before the Hieroglyphics, “world jazz” didn't have a name. There was American jazz and African jazz, Latin jazz and European free jazz — Peter Apfelbaum wanted all of it. The band he founded at Berkeley High in 1977 went on to open for the Grateful Dead, record with Don Cherry, and send generations of players — Steven Bernstein, Benny Green, Craig Handy, Joshua Redman, Ambrose Akinmusire — out into the music. Nearly five decades on, the Hieroglyphics remain less a fixed lineup than a living language: polyrhythm, melody, and improvisation spoken fluently across borders. This August, that language comes to LOOVE ANNEX in its most intimate form — a quintet, up close, in a room built for listening.
PETER APFELBAUM — saxophones, flute, piano, percussion A visionary multi-instrumentalist, composer, and bandleader whose music has never been easy to categorize — and has never needed to be. On any given night he moves from tenor sax to flute to keys to a rope of dangling bells, sometimes within a single tune, conducting as much with his body as with a pen. His compositions — collected most recently on the New York Hieroglyphics' It Is Written — are the band's real frontman: generous, rhythm-drunk, and built to be danced to as much as studied.
JOSH ROSEMAN — trombone & electronics A trombonist of rare duality. Roseman's horn can be straight and buttery one phrase, then spectrally active the next — a herald's voice, muted, electrified, chorused, deployed fluidly and in sequence. It's a voice he developed across years with the Skatalites, Dave Holland, Don Byron, John Zorn, and Me'Shell Ndegeocello, and on his own recordings (Cherry, Treats for the Nightwalker, New Constellations), where groove music and dub-space are treated as serious compositional terrain. Here, with electronics extending the horn, he plays both sections — brass and atmosphere.
DAVID PHELPS — guitar The Hieroglyphics' longest-serving guitarist and, by several accounts, its smiliest. Phelps grew up in Denton, Texas, started on bass, and went on to study with Dave Liebman and Dave Holland; his playing carries both lineages — the lyric and the drive. Heard on "It Is Written," leading his own Eclectic Troubadours, and co-founding International Orange, he plays the guitar less as a chordal instrument than as a second horn line, always inside the melody, always smiling at it.
MARCELO PÉREZ — drums The youngest member of the band and, like Apfelbaum and Garabedian, a Berkeley native. Pérez took over the Hieroglyphics' drum chair at Winter Jazzfest and promptly won the room with a solo that the crowd wouldn't let go of. His playing carries the Afro-diasporic pulse at the center of this music — not as decoration but as first language — and he holds the rare quality in a young drummer of making deep groove feel quiet.
NOAH GARABEDIAN — bass A large, kind spirit, and his sound mirrors that. Raised in Berkeley, trained in ethnomusicology at UCLA and at NYU, a John Coltrane National Scholarship winner and Thelonious Monk Institute finalist, Garabedian plays the bass the way he moves through the world — warmly, unhurriedly, and with room for everyone else in it. A bandleader himself (and a member of the trio collective Ember), he is the floor this quintet stands on.
Saturday, August 8th at LOOVE ANNEX. The language, up close.
