Stephan Crump’s Passerine
Saturday November 21st at Rhizome DC at 6950 Maple Street, NW DC. Doors at 7:00, music at 7:30. Admission $25-$30, sliding scale. Advance Tickets.
Grammy-nominated composer and bassist Stephan Crump presents an extraordinary new quartet and body of work inspired by the various nest-building techniques of birds.
Ches Smith (percussion), Kenny Warren (trumpet), David Leon (alto flute & saxophone), and Stephan Crump (acoustic bass).
Their new album arrives October 23rd on Out of Your Head Records.
Pre-Order Passerine on LP / CD / Hi-Res at Bandcamp
Studio Video: first single, “Stuck”
Live Video: Passerine performing live at Bar Bayeux in June 2025
“As a bassist and composer, Mr. Crump avoids obvious routes but manages never to lose his way” - The New York Times
“strikingly fresh and unobvious compositions...an impressive and original voice” - The Wire
“categories cease to matter” - JazzTimes
“a visionary artist who can convey profound themes through the medium of sound” - AllAboutJazz
“Crump’s music is original” - Downbeat
Stephan Crump is a bassist and composer, collaborator and bandleader, soloist and educator, based in New York City since 1994. A Memphis native, Crump fell for New York’s fecund scenes during his first semester at Amherst College, when he would drive hours to play late- night, weekday gigs in the West Village. He knew this is where he’d make his life and career.
Working beyond genre, he has become a crucial component of multiple New York music communities in and beyond jazz. For two decades, Crump recorded and toured as a third of Vijay Iyer’s acclaimed trio, helping to build that band’s global reputation. Meanwhile, many of his own ensembles—Rhombal, with Tyshawn Sorey, Ellery Eskelin, and Adam O’Farrill; Secret Keeper, with Mary Halvorson; Rosetta Trio, with Jamie Fox and Liberty Ellman—prize versatility and voicings in a manner that more traditional configurations often do not. His Borderlands Trio, with pianist Kris Davis and drummer Eric McPherson, brings this same mentality to a more familiar setting. Other collaborators have included Miguel Zenón, Gordon Gano, Patti Austin, Johnny Clyde Copeland, Wadada Leo Smith, Jim Campilongo, David Gilmore, Sam Newsome, Steve Lehman, Cory Smythe, Ingrid Laubrock, Okkyung Lee, Mat Maneri, and Ches Smith.
Crump’s physical and emotional connection to the bass is abundant through the new sextet Slow Water, which explores ecology and environment through composition and group communication. He teaches On Magnetism, a course in connecting more deeply through one’s instrument, after a lifetime of doing just that, and lives still in Brooklyn with his wife and collaborator, the singer Jen Chapin, and their two sons.
Originally from Sacramento, California, Ches Smith is a drummer, percussionist, and composer based in New York. He has collaborated with a host of artists on many scenes since the early 2000s, including Marc Ribot, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Darius Jones, David Torn, John Tchicai, Nels Cline, Mary Halvorson, Trevor Dunn, Terry Riley, Kris Davis, Dave Holland, Secret Chiefs 3, Xiu Xiu, Good for Cows, Theory of Ruin, and Mr. Bungle, among others.
He has nine records to his name as a bandleader that feature his writing and ensemble curation, and is a devout student of Haitian Vodou drums, performing in religious and folkloric contexts in New York and Haiti for the last decade.
David Leon is a Cuban-American saxophonist, woodwinds player, composer, and improviser living in Brooklyn, New York. His work is guided by a persistent search for vitality through autonomy, contradiction, hyperbole, and humor. David was a 2025 Jerome Artist Resident at Roulette Intermedium. In 2024, he was named a Music Composition Fellow by the CINTAS Foundation and was commissioned by Roulette to support the creation of A Divine Echo, a hybrid work of chamber music and nonverbal puppet theatre. He currently leads multiple ensembles Locomotive - a double horns-guitars-percussion trio co-led with Adam O’Farrill, and Thumbs - a duo with multi-reedist Yuma Uesaka. 2024 saw the release of Bird's Eye - a woodwinds- gayagum-drumset trio recording out on Pyroclastic Records described as “stately and buoyant, intricate and sly” (The Wire) and “unlike anything else” (PostGenre).
David has contributed to projects led by composer-improvisors Stephan Crump, Cory Smythe, Lesley Mok, Nick Dunston. Performing across a wide range of musics, he has collaborated with folkloric mavericks Manley ‘Piri’ Lopez and Miriam Elhajli, indie artists from 37d03d, Childish Japes and Caroline Rose, composers William Britelle, Vicente Hansen Atria and Alec Goldfarb, Latin pop artists Romeo Santos, Rauw Alejandro and Prince Royce, puppeteers Emily Batsford (CUMULO), yara asmar (Paperhouse Waltzes) and Official Puppet Business, contemporary artist David Zink Yi and others.
His work has been recognized by Roulette Intermedium, The CINTAS Foundation, The Jazz Gallery’s Mentoring Series, New Music USA, Metropolis Ensemble, Detroit Composer’s Project, Compositum Musicae Novae, the National Youngarts Foundation, and the ASCAP Foundation.
Denver born trumpeter/composer Kenny Warren has been living in Brooklyn since 2006. He has released over a dozen records of his own music which reach across genre but always center some element of improvisation. His latest LP on Out of Your Head Records with his trio Sweet World features Christopher Hoffman on cello and Nathan Ellman-Bell on drums. He is currently involved with many collective projects including a band called Slow Tiger with JP Schlegelmilch, a trio with Carlo Costa and BlankFor.ms, and band with Berlin-based woodwind virtuoso, Jeremy Viner. Warren has worked with some of New York's finest artists including Angelica Sanchez, Anna Webber, Stephan Crump, Tony Malaby, Rob Brown, Gerald Cleaver, Chris Speed, and Caroline Davis. He is also a long standing member of the Brooklyn brass band institution Slavic Soul Party.