Luke Stewart’s Silt Remembrance Ensemble + sinonó

September 22, 2025 at 7:30 PM

The Sultan Room

On September 22, FourOneOne presents a double bill with Luke Stewart’s Silt Remembrance Ensemble (with Daniel Carter, Jamal Moore, Chad Taylor, Brian Settles, No Land, and Janice Lowe) and isabel crespo pardo’s poem-song trio, sinonó (with Lester St. Louis and Henry Fraser). 

The intergenerational Silt Remembrance Ensemble draws on the membership of two groups in bassist and organizer Luke Stewart's vast constellation—veteran saxophonists/multi-instrumentalists Daniel Carter and Jamal Moore are members of Remembrance Quintet (with Stewart, Chris Williams and Tcheser Holmes), while drummer Chad Taylor and saxophonist Brian Settles are Stewart's bandmates in Silt Trio. The group combines Silt's driving, straight-ahead sound with Remembrance Quintet's searching, almost ceremonial approach, with poets No Land and Janice Lowe contributing text and vocal performances. As with many of Stewart's projects, the poetics of ancestral recall and in-the-moment creativity are never far away. The group brings together collaborators from Stewart's many musical communities, DC (Settles), Chicago (Taylor), Baltimore (Moore) and New York (Carter, No Land, Lowe) and grounds itself in Stewart's lived philosophy of improvisational liberation.

While sinonó is the primary compositional vehicle of NYC-based Latinx vocalist isabel crespo pardo, improvisation is also very much at the center of this group. Cellist Lester St. Louis (of HxH) and double bassist Henry Fraser, each singular improviser-composers in their own right, are ideal co-creators; sinonó's improvised passages coalesce suddenly into text-grounded song forms in beautifully unexpected yet intuitive ways. crespo pardo's singing constantly toes the line between song and sonority, and even their more abstract vocalizations feel more like cosmic extensions of Latin American folk traditions than the "extended techniques" of any avant-garde. Their voice changes form as the moment demands, full and commanding one moment, spoken or almost a whisper the next. But rather than seeming like the channeling of different spirits or characters, these transfigurations are an earthbound reassurance that every being contains many states.