TICKETS are $20 General/$10 Student.

Concerts and events made possible, in part, with support from the Wells Philanthropic Services provided by grants from the John, Anna, and Martha Jane Fields Memorial Trust Foundation and the Florence V. Carroll Charitable Trust, The Esther and George Jaruga Charitable Foundation, the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County's ArtsEverywhere initiative, and the Arts Project Support Grant and Arts Recovery Grant through the Indiana Arts Commission.

“...the group plays with disciplined energy and a respect for the unexpected, always leaving room for new directions..”; All About Jazz

“...the group does create sublime sonic abstractions..”; Chicago Jazz Magazine

Javier Red - Piano

Jake Wark - Tenor Sax

Ben Dillinger - Bass

Gustavo Cortiñas - Drums

When forming this band, Javier, Jake, Gustavo, and Ben put their usual musical abilities aside. The music invited a different set of assumptions and insights to be discovered, manifested, and woven into the band’s sound. The result is a music that is intuitive but also, seductively puzzling. As Javier stated: “it is like re-discovering musical intuition”. That is what makes listening to this band so exciting.

The new album, Ephemeral Assumptions -featuring Javier Red (piano), Jake Wark (tenor saxophone), Gustavo Cortinas (Drums) and Ben Dillinger (Bass)- is a strong collective statement of the band’s arrival. The music ranges from the earthy and physical “Stretched Particle” to the introspective and reflective “Suspension”. With strong and mysterious rhythmic hooks, this album fully engages the listener’s imagination and attention. Within the band, “a strong natural musicality is always there, while also maintaining a draw of the enigmatic”, Javier said. The album was released the summer of 2019 with Delmark Records.

About Epheral Certainties - Troy Dostert- All About Jazz:

”Pianist Javier Red hails from Mexico, but since 2015 he’s been part of the ever-dynamic Chicago jazz scene, enabling him to team up with three other Windy City-based colleagues on Ephemeral Certainties, the debut disc from a band he calls Imagery Converter. With a shared commitment to finding purpose through diverse melodic fragments and disparate rhythmic figures, the group plays with disciplined energy and a respect for the unexpected, always leaving room for new directions to emerge within these eight substantial tracks.

Tenor saxophonist Jake Wark has a warm, precise delivery, perfect for pieces that rely on subtle give-and-take and oblique revelations. He can do a lot with a little, starting with some staccato bursts on “Minimal Expansion” and working them over alongside Red’s own elliptical phrasing, gradually elongating his statements in conversation with Red, who becomes similarly more voluble as the piece progresses. And bassist Ben Dillinger works terrifically in tandem with drummer Gustavo Cortiñas, who shifts rhythmic gears so frequently that it’s a marvel that the band’s expressions remain so cohesive. His skillful negotiations in “Stretched Particle,” a piece with some remarkably elastic grooves, are especially impressive. He never dominates the track, even though his malleable presence is essential to the rhythmic thrust of the music.

Red shows himself to be every bit his partners’ equal, with a deep sensitivity that colors his classically-inflected solo reverie to begin “Suspension,” but with an energetic side that emerges front-and-center on the vigorous opener, “Minimal Pieces,” during which he generates momentum both in his punctuated support for Wark’s gregarious solo as well as in his own fleet exploration of the keyboard. But this is one of those recordings where individual virtuosity is decisively subordinated to the group concept: one never gets the impression that these players crave attention personally that they would rather have directed toward their collective product.”