Trevor Dunn’s Trio-Convulsant

Fresh from a reunion of avant-rock provocateurs Mr. Bungle, bassist and composer Trevor Dunn reconvenes his exploratory jazz outfit Trio-Convulsant for the first time in nearly 20 years. Celebrating the release of their evocative new album Séances, Ars Nova Workshop presents a performance by the trio featuring Dunn with guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Ches Smith, joined by the strings and winds quartet Folie à Quatre, at Solar Myth, Thursday, October 27, 2022.

Now among the most revered voices in progressive jazz, Mary Halvorson and Ches Smith were promising but relatively unknown names when they last joined Trevor Dunn for Trio-Convulsant’s Sister Phantom Owl Fish in 2004. Since that time Dunn has worked in a staggering array of settings, including the bands Endangered Blood, SpermChurch, Dan Weiss’ Starebaby, and the Nels Cline Singers, stints in weirdo-rock outfits Fantômas, Tomahawk and the Melvins; and collaborations with the likes of John Zorn, Wendy Eisenberg, Kris Davis, Jamie Saft, Shelley Burgon, Roswell Rudd and Erik Friedlander, among others.

The music for Séances was inspired by two vastly different and typically, for Dunn, eclectic inspirations: Desmond Blue, the 1962 album by saxophonist Paul Desmond’s band with guitarist Jim Hall with string orchestra; and the Convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard, an 18th-century French Christian sect whose fevered worship took on the former of ecstatic convulsions and miraculous, near-orgiastic displays.