News

--January 2007--

It's hard to believe we've started a new year already, and we've got lots of stuff on the planning board already. In March, Yells At Eels, under the guise of our Hispanic alter-ego, Banda de Brujos, will do a tour of Michigan colleges with Carl Smith, tenor saxophonist, as our invited guest. The shows focus on immigration issues and the role Mexican music has played in that struggle.

We played The Stone, John Zorn's venue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on the 8th of December, with Patrick Holmes on clarinet and Ken Filiano on bass. Sitting in that evening were Mark Taylor on mellophone and Matt Lavelle on pocket trumpet. The next night Dennis led an all-star British improvising group with Tony Levin on drums, Paul Rogers on bass, and Paul Dunmall on tenor (even throwing in a few rounds on the late Elton Dean's saxello!)

Clean Feed has just release the new CD by the Alvin Fielder Trio (Alvin's first as leader in his 50 years as a legend in jazz) called A Measure of Vision. The trio is rounded out by Chris parker on piano, Dennis on trumpet, and it's augmented to quintet status by the addition of Aaron on bass and Stefan on vibes and drums.

In April, Dennis will travel to Portugal to play with Rodrigo Amado's Lisbon Improvisation Players...more news on that front when details become available.

Happy New 2007 to all!

--September 2006--

The Yells At Eels/Akkolyte/Unconscious Collective Split Tour 2006 was a great, great success. Fifteen performances total, with 5 special gigs that included our good friend and fabulous Portuguese saxophonist, Rodrigo Amado. The cities that hosted us were Waterville, Maine; Philadelphia, New York, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Dallas, Oakland, and Vancouver, B.C.

Clean Feed Records in Lisbon released 2 CD's worth mentioning here. My 2004 Boston recording with Joe Morris and Nate McBride on bass, Croix Galipault on drums, and Charlie Kohlhase on saxes is called No Photograph Available, and was recorded live at Artists-At-Large Gallery in Hyde Park. It appeared in June. The new Lisbon Improvisation Players CD with Rodrigo Amado on saxes, Bruno Pedroso on drums, Pedro Goncalves on bass, and Ulrich Mitzlaff on cello is named Spiritualized and was released in August, just in time for my Portugal/ Madeira tour with the same group, and with the Dennis Gonzalez Madeira New Music Workshop Orchestra, a great 15-piece group of musicians from the paradise island of Madeira.

My appearance at the Clean Feed Festival on September 20, at Barbes in Brooklyn, was cancelled due to a bout of food poisoning, possibly spinach-related! But the show went on with Charlie Kohlhase on saxes, making the trek in from Boston, Ken Filiano on bass, and Lou Grassi on drums.

______________________________________________________________________

The new Yells At Eels CD, "Geografia" has been released on Aaron's new label, Inner Realms Outer Realms Records. The recordings span nearly two years of hard work with special guests Devon Wells on flute, Bill Pohl on guitar, Kim Corbet on trombone, voice and keyboard/electronics, and tenor saxophonist Carl Smith. Go here to order it!

At the end of May, I should be receiving the new Dennis Gonzalez Boston Project CD from Clean Feed Records. It was recorded live at AAL Gallery in Hyde Park (Boston) and features Joe Morris and Nate McBride on acoustic basses, Croix Galipault on drums, and Charlie Kohlhase on saxophones.

The second week of June Yells At Eels will begin our East Coast tour with guest tenor saxophonist from Portugal, Rodrigo Amado. This includes a Vision Festival/JazzCorner concert and jam on Friday, June 16 with Mexican saxophonist Remi Alvarez as a special guest. And in late June/early July, we will play the Vancouver Jazz Festival at the Rime Eurasian Cafe venue.

We will keep you posted on all these releases and concerts...

--January 2006--

On Tuesday, December 27, 2005, we recorded our latest musical venture at the

beautiful Mesquite Arts Center concert hall stage in Mesquite, Texas. The sound is

lovely and soft, and the re-mix is being done now for the next week or so. We

recorded an untitled song that we'd premiered on our East Coast/Portugal tour in June,

which used gongs and bells and shakers, like the Art Ensemble does in concert, as

well as a new version (with and without vocals by Leena Conquest) of Ganesha the

Spy from our first Yells At Eels CD, Home, and various new bop-influenced

compositions for trio and quintet.

On the recording, the drum chairs were filled by Stefan Gonzalez and the great

Chicago/Mississippi drummer Alvin Fielder. Aaron Gonzalez played double bass and

Chris Parker, from Memphis, played the Center's 9-foot Steinway grand piano. Leena

Conquest, fresh from William Parker's Raining on the Moon band, did the vocals, and I

played trumpet and cornet.

--December 2005--

I just got word that my prose piece about the collaboration between me and Yusef Komunyakaa on the CD Herido has just been published by the Johns Hopkins UniversityPress in Vol. 28, Number 3, of the literary journal Callaloo. It's five pages long and also shows my sheet music from the concert/recording at St. James Cathedral in Chicago in November of 1999.

--November 2005

I just got my copy of Sentence: a journal of prose poetics, Volume 3, which has published one of my prose poems, Bombay-Kathmandu Suite. It is a lovely, well-edited journal, and worth getting, not only for my piece, which is one of the longer pieces in this edition, but for the other, great work as well.

--June 2005--

The new CD with Oliver Lake, Idle Wild, is getting great reviews. It was recorded in New York on August 6, 2004, and was released by Lisbon's Clean Feed Records

June of 2005, just in time for our performance at Vision Fest 2005 in New York.

Personnel on the CD are: Oliver Lake on alto saxophone, Ken Filiano on double bass, and Mike "T.A." Thompson on drums...of course, I play trumpets.

Speaking of Vision Festival, our performance with Oliver Lake was nothing short of phenomenal, even though we were the last act of the festival and we didn't get started until 1:45 am the next day (June 20)!

The quartet was Dennis Gonzalez on trumpets and percussion, Oliver Lake on alto saxophone, Aaron Gonzalez on double bass, and Stefan Gonzalez on drums. We were honored by an enthusiastic, if tired, audience, made up of the world's finest new jazz musicians and listeners, along with the great legendary bassist Henry Grimes, who sat up front and cheered us on.