Michael Pedicin began his career as a young saxophonist in Philadelphia, being mentioned in Downbeat as “the most exciting soloist in the entire three day jazz festival.” Following his early college years, Michael continued a ten year stint with Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International Records as a busy studio musician and touring saxophonist with The O’Jays, David Bowie, Lou Rawls, Stevie Wonder, MFSB, and many other acts that felt compelled to record at the famous Sigma Sound Studios.

 Cover $10 (includes one house drink)

The H.G.T. Project has been playing as a trio for a solid year, making music with electronically-altered and acoustic instruments. They combine their disparate backgrounds into a trio that, while firmly rooted in the jazz tradition, points to new avenues of artistic expression and excellence. Their sets will alternate between acoustic and electronic soundscapes.

 Cover $10 (includes one house drink)

Maria Tucci has worked extensively on and off b'way : Athol Fugard's A Lesson from Aloes, Tennsssee Williams' Night of the iguana, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Rose Tattoo ( tony nomination) Substance of Fire by John Robin Baitz. The Three Sisters, The Seagull, The Winter's Tale, Collected Stories etc...

The musical component for this performance is organized around songs Akhmatova herself would have known. Russian folk and popular songs and works by Dmitri Shostakovich will be re-imagined on violin and accordion, as springboards for improvisation. Shostakovich's tragic Soviet history mirrored Akhmatova's, and the poet followed the composer ardently, as historian Orlando Figes recounts:

“Akhmatova rarely missed a Shostakovich premiere. After the first performance of his Eleventh Symphony in 1957, she compared its hopeful revolutionary songs, which the critics dismissed as devoid of interest, to “white birds flying against a terrible black sky.” The next year she dedicated the Soviet Edition of her Poems: ‘To Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich, in whose epoch I lived on earth’. The two eventually met in 1961. ‘We sat in silence for twenty minutes. It was wonderful,’ recalled Akhmatova” - from Orlando Figes’ Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

Kalmanovitch joined the faculty of Boston's New England Conservatory in 2006, and currently serves as the Assistant Chair of the Department of Contemporary Improvisation. In addition to her work at NEC, she teaches regularly at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, UK and the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague, NL, and frequently presents workshops on improvisation for jazz and classical musicians internationally. She holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Alberta, where her work focused on exoticism and jazz.

Borey Shin presents a new voice as an improviser and composer coming from the Downtown New York scene. Trained as a jazz pianist, he plays accordion and analog synthesizers in varied musical contexts. Borey Shin has performed and collaborated with a diverse range of musicians.
 Cover $10 (includes one house drink)

Angelo Verga is the author of six collections of poetry and has been published widely here & abroad. Verga resides in lower Manhattan.

Michele Battiste's first full-length collection, Ink for an Odd Cartography, was a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and published in 2009 by Black Lawrence Press. She is also the author of three chapbooks, the most recent of which is Slow the Appetite Down (Spire Press). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Mid-American Review, Women's Studies Quarterly and Verse Daily among other journals. She lives in Boulder, Colorado where she teaches and studies and wades in the creek.
 Cover $7 (includes one house drink)   www.michelebattiste.com/

Raised in Minnesota and transplanted to Brooklyn, Chris Morrissey has largely been known as an indie rock and alt-folk bassist. But his debut release as a leader this year is a powerful statement and, at times, a fresh slice of Americana. The singsong melodies you might expect from a regular associate of Andrew Bird, Mason Jennings and Ben Kweller are mostly absent here, making way for more unsettling lines.

The Morning World (sunnyside) received high praise from NPR's A Blog Supreme placing it at #3 on a list of "5 jazz records you should play for people who think they don't like jazz". It also appeared on the Village Voice's year end Jazz Consumer's List, earning an A- and Brenton Plourde from Jazz Times called it "the shape of things to come for bassists and bandleaders".

In his 2 years as a New Yorker he's enlisted the help of some of the city's finest young musicians including Mark Guiliana, Aaron Parks, Ben Wendel, Pete Rende, and Nir Felder.

 Cover $10 (includes one house drink)

Gabrielle Selz is an award winning writer and storyteller. She has published in The New York Times, Newsday, More Magazine and writes regularly about art for The Huffington Post. She has just finished a memoir that chronicles her coming of age in the art world among the extremely eccentric over-the-top personalities of the 60s and 70s. Ms. Selz lives with her skaterat son, Theo, and their feisty little dog, surrounded on three sides by water.

Adelaide Mestre is an actress, singer, writer and solo show performer. In her work, she mines the autobiographic material of her childhood and family history chronicling the trails and tribulations of growing up in an eccentric family, among artists and over the top personalities. Adelaide began her career at The Public Theatre where at 14 she had her first job as an actress in a musical, and worked with Joseph Papp. Since then, she has performed in numerous theatrical productions, musicals, cabarets and films including Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives. Adelaide has written and performed several solo shows including: Dead Mosquito at Emerging Artists Theatre's One Woman Standing Festival and Out of Step at Where Eagles Dare Theatre. Most recently, her musical memoir Top Drawer was presented at the Midtown International Theatre Festival as a work in progress.

$7.00 includes a drink

“My role is the one of a musician,” Serpa says, “I don't have to be soloing all the time or just interpreting songs. Basically I want to be able to do with my voice what instrumentalists do with their instruments—to use it, to sing, to be part of an ensemble. Every instrument has its own challenges or limitations, but the main goal is to be a complete musician, with good ears and a sense of rhythm, melody, and harmony. I just want to contribute what feels better for each tune and for the message I want to transmit with it.

“Sara Serpa is cool all over, from conception to execution. She’s got a style just about locked down.” New York Times
 Cover $10 (includes one house drink)   www.saraserpa.com ,  www.myspace.com/saraserpa

Matos has been performing and recording with Sara Serpa, Greg Osby, Thomas Morgan, Noah Preminger, George Garzone, Mikado Lab and João Lencastre among many other exciting artists.

¨Matos is a free thinker¨ All About Jazz

¨(In "Quare")Mr. Matos advances a pointedly contemporary air¨. The New York Times
 Cover $10 (includes one house drink)   www.andrematosmusic.com

Meyer Lansky Tribute

All open reading with a special focus on poems associated with criminal activity

(or poems so good it's a crime they're not in print!)

Arrive before 6 pm to sign up.

$ 7 includes adrink

J.D. Allen, Michael Bates, Jeff Davis, Ross Lossing form a new quartet that plays with inarguable charisma and groove. The quartet showcases rising star Michael Bates' musical identity...and he has assembled without question, much more than just three virtuoso musicians. Taking equal inspiration from jazz and modern music like the Bad Brains, Stravinsky and Ornette Coleman, this quartet is a perfect band for enthusiasts of cutting-edge composition. They blur the line between written music and improvisation and leave the listener in a incredible space where musical tradition meets a modern zest for experiment.

"Michael Bates serves up contrapuntal elegance and melodic modernism. Fans of Dave Douglas and Ornette Coleman will likely approve"—Time Out, New York

"Simply put, Michael Bates had the goods to seriously affect the face of modern jazz"—Glenn Astarita, Jazz Review/Downbeat
 Cover $15 (includes one house drink)   www.outsidesources.org ,  www.myspace.com/michaelbatesmusic

"Pianist Eri Yamamoto is one of jazz's most dynamic talents. Her compositional style augments her deft, inventive playing" -All About Jazz New York-
 Cover $10 (includes one house drink)   www.eriyamamoto.com