The Creative Music Guild

Special Matinee on Day 13 of the CMG improv fest:

Sunday, October 26 • 3PM
Strum Guitar • $15–$30
Lori Goldston + Mike Gamble

A powerful afternoon of improvised and exploratory sound with two extraordinary musicians.

Lori Goldston is a Seattle-based cellist and composer whose singular voice on the cello moves seamlessly between classical, experimental, and underground traditions. She has performed with Nirvana, Earth, David Byrne, Mirah, and the BBC Scottish Symphony, and collaborated across disciplines with filmmakers, visual artists, dancers, and writers around the world. Her playing is known for its raw, expressive tone and fearless sense of space and sound.

Mike Gamble is an adventurous guitarist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist with roots in New York’s experimental jazz and rock scenes. Now based in Portland, he has recorded over 50 albums and performed across North America and Europe with his trio The Inbetweens. He is also the Artistic Director of Portland’s Creative Music Guild and teaches at OSU and Reed College.

Expect boundary-pushing music, deep listening, and moments of unexpected beauty.

Tickets at the door.
Poster by ._jane_._

Night 13 of the Improv fest

SKERIK (solo)
LORI GOLDSTON w/ Pacific Lumber & Wire
Saturday, October 25th, 2025
8:00 PM
$20–40 sliding scale
Leaven Community Center — 5431 NE 20th Ave, Portland, OR

A night of unfiltered sound and fearless improvisation.

SKERIK is a genre-defying saxophonist with a legacy that spans three decades and hundreds of collaborations from Mad Season to Critters Buggin, Garage a Trois, Les Claypool, and SUNN O))). Equal parts jazz virtuoso, noise scientist, and spiritual agitator, he performs a rare solo set: raw, unbound, and alive with sonic risk.

“Hardening of the categories leads to Art Disease.” John Medeski
Skerik has taken that to heart blending jazz, sludge metal, electronics, African rhythms, and beyond. His solo work is unpredictable, often feral, always deeply human.

LORI GOLDSTON, the singular cellist known for her work with Nirvana, Earth, and countless artists across genres and mediums, joins Pacific Lumber & Wire, Portland’s open-source string collective. Her cello voice earthy, spectral, rigorously unclassifiable blurs composition and improvisation, tradition and invention.

Described as “hugely important to contemporary music history” (The Quietus) and “cello music from fathoms deep” (NPR), Lori brings a rare depth and clarity to every ensemble she enters.

Pacific Lumber & Wire, hosted by bassist Andrew Jones, explores collaborative structured improvisation. Graphic scores, sonic games, process pieces, and intuition collide—creating music that exists only once, then disappears.

Featuring:
Timmy Barnett – violin
Jacob Mitas – violin/viola
Chibia Ulinwa – viola
Alexis Mahler – viola
James Staub – cello
Rodolfo Lopez – bass
Andrew Jones – bass

Night 10 of the Improvisation Fest:
Come see an opening set of Xylyn’s and then join her for an open ended improvisation! All are welcome

Wednesday, October 22nd
Swan Dive
727 SE Grand Ave,
$15-30
8pm

Xylyn Hathaway and Open Improvisation

Xylyn Hathaway has become a conduit of vulgar-beauty-jazz music that sinks teeth into the space it fills. She paints canvas into composition and wield an upright bass like bazookas, exploding hearts open peeled backwards into one bouquet of manic laughter from the pit of your chest.
Xylyn is a cherished figure and friend in our jazz community; born on Earth, one stones throw west from the palpitating heart of downtown Portland, Oregon.
A forager for chanterelles, she was raised on the farm in Newberg with Grandma. When Grandma died they lost the old farmhouse, red and white and alive in the decaying cherry walnut orchards. Grandma lives in Noble Pioneer Cemetery now, Xylyn in Southwest Portland.
As a band leader, Xylyn’s musical visions unfold and sprout behemoth architecture dimly lit, oozing spirits from the gills as it gasps for it’s first breath beneath thumps quantized in fractals. She propels a soloist or a broken poet off cliffs into jupiter’s hurricane eye.
She plays with cats like George Colligan, like Ron Steen, like anybody making big nasty music to be hurt and healed by in this wet crow city.
Xylyn Hathaway’s heart and music exude peace and play and oozing spirits, dancing between us, around us, below the violent ocean dismembered by big old stones.”
- David Barber