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NATURE CHANNEL, the new albume by the Green Mitchell Trio released March 2025

Nature Channel is the latest release by San Francisco Bay Area multi-reedist and composer Cory Wright’s Green Mitchell Trio. The long-awaited follow up to the trio’s Edgetone Records debut, Nature Channel is a diverse collection of pieces imagining new possibilities for the classic sax-bass-drums trio. Tuneful melodies, high-energy free improvisation, driving (acoustic) metal, rippling spaciousness, and finely crafted dissonances combine to create five distinct sound worlds for the trio’s explorations.

Nature Channel and Archimera are the second and third albums in a series of 12 recordings featuring Bay Area creative composers and musicians, released monthly from February 2025 through February 2026 by bassist Lisa Mezzacappa’s micro label Queen Bee Records.

Wright’s Green Mitchell collaborators are powerful and enduring contributors to the Bay Area creative music world. Bassist Lisa Mezzacappa is a top practitioner of both traditional and extended techniques on the instrument and her own recent projects include the sextet album Cosmicomics, the audio opera The Electronic Lover, and the multi-media song cycle Glorious Ravage. Jason Levis is a dynamic drummer who deftly integrates groove, energy, precision and nuance in his playing. He is an accomplished composer and is the leader of the avant-dub reggae band Joseph’s Bones. Mezzacappa and Levis have a longstanding partnership in the adventurous ensemble duo B., and their omnivorous approach to musical styles and materials makes them a perfect fit for Wright’s compositional and improvisational sensibilities. Together, the three continue to find new modes of interplay, seeking original ways to express the ineffable.

trio photo: Myles Boisen

artwork by Orbital Monkeys

ARCHIMERA, The new album by Bristle released May 2025

artwork by Callum McKean

In its first release in 10 years, the Northern California chamber jazz ensemble Bristle unleashes Archimera, a hybrid creation epitomizing its unique four-as-one group aesthetic and showcasing its wide-ranging sonic explorations that combine innovative composition and virtuosic improvisation in surprising and fresh ways. Archimera is Bristle’s answer to the riddle what do you get when a Midwestern sax nerd mind melds with a SoCal reed master, a Staten Island metal-turned-jazz bass player, and a Scottish fiddler/orchestral oboist?

Archimera presents the band commanding a dizzying array of instruments and approaches yet operating as a single entity as it navigates the wily, playful and extraordinarily unique compositions of co-leaders Randy McKean and Cory Wright. Wright kicks the group into action with his Fluxx-like choose-your-own-adventure creation Lines of Work and the cinematic Basset, which envisions a literal fox hunt, with crafty strings pitted against hound-like low reeds. McKean’s compositions Wraparound, a shifting array of angular puzzle pieces, and Thicket, a Zen-like etude of near-unison melodies, epitomize Bristle’s ability to play as one instrument. Wright’s elegiac arrangement of iconic Bay Area songwriting duo Ramon and Jessica’s Flight II, and McKean’s snapshot of a winter month in Banff, Canada, Vape Trail, end the album with an ephemeral vanishing point.

Bristle, the Northern California based sax-and-strings-fueled chamber jazz quartet of Randy McKean, Cory Wright, Murray Campbell, and Lisa Mezzacappa, channels the individual virtuosity of its members into intricate group interactions that blur the line between composition and cooperative game strategies. Formed in 2009, Bristle has toured throughout California and the Pacific Northwest, from Seattle to Bakersfield, bringing their Art Ensemble meets Kronos Quartet sound to the SF Bay Area’s Garden of Memory and West Oakland Sound Series, Sacramento’s In the Flow Festival and the California Gold Country’s Col. MaCaw’s Magical Cure-All. Their music, called “fun and thought-provoking” (Memory Select), and full of “shrewd harmonic twists” (Downtown Music Gallery), is featured on their CDs Bulletproof (Edgetone, 2012) and Future(s) Now(s) (Queen Bee, 2014), the latter named one of the Top California Jazz Releases of 2014 by KQED.

photo: Myles Boisen