Come out for a special Wednesday Jazz Jam with touring trio Special Adaptions who will be playing a set of music before opening up the session and facilitating a jam.

$10 cover | $5 cover for participating musicians

Special Adaptations, today a trio, took its first shape as a collaborative project between American musicians Alex Levine, Ben Rolston, Stephen Boegehold, and Italian musicians Stefano Grasso and Andrea “Jimmy” Catagnoli.

The Quintet was born during a two week residency that happened in Milan in November 2019, at Mare Culturale Urbano, followed by a tour in northern Italy. The magic atmosphere between the musicians and the natural flow of the music was recorded at Guscio Recordings Studio in those days, and published in April 2021 by Berlin based label AUT Records. Special Adaptations performed, among other venues, in Trentino Jazz, Lume Meets NY Jazz Now, and Springtime Jazz Festival.

In trio or quintet, Special Adaptations plays the original music of guitarist and composer Alex Levine. The music is studied by focusing on the single sections of each song, repeated like mantras, absorbed in the body’s memory, and, in a deeper sense, treated, stretched, and sewn in different combinatorial possibilities. In practice, elements of the songs are free to emerge independently from each musician. The ever-shifting relations between soloists, leader, and band, creates an equilibrated and surprising ecosystem where sudden fades from different atmospheres draw the shape of a unique manifold sound-organism.

The poetry of the band sits in the bare, essential, haiku-like aesthetic of the guitarist and composer, which gives the musicians both the ideas of extreme freedom and complete devotion to the composed material. Thus effortless ideas give shape to rivers of sounds, mountains of colors, seas of atmospheres, open skies of fresh air.