Nate Mercereau, Carlos Niño, and Surya Botofasina at the Sylvan Amphitheater (photo by Glen Han)
Friends!
It is with the utmost of enthusiasms that we announce a very special gathering upon the hills of Eagle Rock’s historic Sylvan Theater. This has been a months-long conversation led by TERA (The Eagle Rock Association), curated in collaboration with our International Anthem family, and with enormous support from both the CD14 office of Ysabel Jurado and the staff of the Yosemite Recreation Center.
Did you know that off Yosemite Drive, tucked away on the back slope of the Occidental College Campus, is a hidden 1930s treasure of Northeast LA? It’s a rare treat to gather here, so to honor the occasion, we’re going especially deep and hosting a free concert featuring a Jeff Parker Expansion Duo with Jeremiah Chiu. International Anthem’s Scottie McNiece DJ’s before and after, and we have one more kindred spirit to announce as the day comes closer. If an early October evening of free spirited art with two of the most tonally distinct & warm hearted musicians in Los Angeles sounds like your vibe, then pull up a blanket and join us in the park for a solar-powered gathering of expansive prismatic music.
Enormous gratitude to these friends, heroes, and artists who move our hearts for their openness in being a part of this evening. Thank you to each of our community partners for making this day possible, and we hope to see you real soon.
All ages always.
Bring your pups, lots of water, a picnic, anything you like.
We ask that you please don’t smoke or bring alcohol into the park.
More info to come.
Jeff Parker is a guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and composer. A longtime member of the influential indie-band Tortoise, Parker is recognized as one of contemporary music’s most versatile and innovative electric guitarists and composers. With a prolific output characterized by musical ideas of angularity and logic, he works in a wide variety of mediums—from pop, rock, and jazz to new music—using ideas informed by innovations and trends in both popular and experimental forms. He creates works that explore and exploit the contrary relationships between tradition and technology, improvisation and composition, and the familiar and the abstract. His sonic palette may employ techniques from sample-based technologies, analog and digital synthesis, and conventional and extended techniques from over four decades of exploring the intricacies of the electric guitar.
Also a prolific collaborator, Parker has appeared as a side musician live and on recordings with performers including Flea, Andrew Bird, Joshua Redman, Vijay Iyer, Smog (Bill Callahan), Toumani Diabaté, Yo La Tengo, Daniel Lanois, Brian Blade, Makaya McCraven, Joey DeFrancesco, Gerald Clayton, Bennie Maupin, Patrice Rushen, Carmen Lundy, Nels Cline, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Clipping, and noted visual artists Theaster Gates, Charles Gaines, Cauleen Smith, and Harold Mendez. Parker has released several critically acclaimed albums under his own name. His latest, Happy Today (International Anthem/Nonesuch, 2024), is out now with International Anthem.
photo by Sam Lee at Zorthian Ranch
Jeremiah Chiu is a synthesist in the broadest sense of the word—a craftsperson of the modular synth and other musical instruments and tools, as well as an artist, designer, and educator whose work continually brings disparate forms of knowledge into new relationships. While widely recognized for his versatile electronic music as a solo artist, textured recordings in a duo with violist Marta Sofia Honer, and the experimental quintet he co-leads, SML, Chiu has simultaneously maintained a practice as a graphic designer and visual artist, developing a practice attentive to both the structure of technological systems and the contingencies of liveness and emergence.
Across his work runs a sustained attentiveness to the unfolding natural world. Whether incorporating field recordings into albums, or through open-air live performance, or through his regular participation in LA's Living Earth series held in public parks, Chiu composes with environments as much as within them. Electronic systems become receptive to the contingencies of wind, birdsong, shifting acoustics, and time itself.
His compositions possess an unusually spatial quality. Rather than simply organizing melody or rhythm, they organize attention—guiding the listener through shifting fields of texture, proximity, repetition, and depth. Listening becomes less an experience of following a linear narrative than inhabiting an environment whose forms continually reorganize themselves. That same attentiveness extends throughout Chiu's broader practice, where sound, image, typography, design, teaching, and kinship become different manifestations of a singular way of thinking.
photo by Sam Lee at Zorthian Ranch
Built in 1931 as a project of the emergency employment bond issue, along with a bathhouse, the Sylvan Theater was constructed of concrete rubble and other materials. A beautiful addition to Yosemite Park, it served as a venue for summer theatre programs and Junior High graduations for many years. In recent years it was programmed as a performance space by the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts, and most recently, it was used to stage classic Greek drama by Eagle Rock High School.
The Sylvan Theater is stewarded by Yosemite Rec Center, which was established in 1889 as part of Los Angeles's first Department of Parks charter.
photo courtesy of the Eagle Rock Valley Historical Society