Green Kill Sessions presents Weave on Friday, December 6, 8 ›PM, 2024, featuring David Strahl, Tom ‘Tbyrd’ Burnett, Catherine ‘Cat’ Rutgers and Thomas Kozumplik

Weave’ is an evening of music, sounds, words, rants, raves, spoken moments, electric eclectic set pieces and improvisations that will intertwine and unwind at the intersection of your mind!

Weave

Contact: Tom Burnett, tombburnett@gmail.com.

‘Weave’ is an evening of music, sounds, words, rants, raves, spoken moments, electric eclectic set pieces and improvisations that will intertwine and unwind at the intersection of your mind!

Featuring solo and collaborative outbursts woven and entangled together by the creative spirits of poet/ musician/ performer Tom ‘Tbyrd’ Burnett, bassist/ sound engineer David Strahl, percussion/ electronics/ composer Thomas Kozumplik, and poet/ visual artist Catherine ‘Cat’ Rutgers.

David Strahl

David Strahl emerged from the dirt known as CBGB and the ’70s NYC underground with a style rooted in the downtown punk and no wave scene – mixing old with new, up with down, and in without.

Before relocating to Kingston, he was the owner and operator of NYC’s Candy Ear Studios, where he engineered and/ or produced recordings by a variety of artists, including Jackson Smith of the Patti Smith Group, actor/ DJ Idris Elba, and Latin flutist Roberto Pitre, to name a few. His rehearsal studio, Grey Area, was home to a number of bands, including Helmet, Foetus, The Cro Mags, Prong, and the Swans.

Strahl’s playing first attracted attention in the band New Noise Continuum. As a member of spaceheater quartet since 2023, he has been playing at such venues as Colony Woodstock, Tinker Street Tavern, Station Bar, and Green Kill Sessions.

Tom ‘Tbyrd’ Burnett

Tom ‘Tbyrd’ Burnett, spoken word/ performance theatre artist/ musician-keyboardist, is knee-deep in developing solo work and collaborations for his project The New Agenda. Highlights of 2024 include appearing at the Bowery Poetry Club for SLAM vs. SLAM: of Poets & Puppets, and at Book Club Bar for Galinsky’s Poetry in New York. In collaboration with EK Duo, he performed at the Foundry in Cambridge, Mass., and at Andrea Clearfield’s SZalon in Philadelphia.

Tom is a veteran of the very early poetry slam scene in Chicago, and was a featured performer for the National Cultural Alliance’s on-air campaign to promote arts awareness along with the Guggenheim Museum and saxophonist Pharaoh Saunders. In NYC, from 1988 onward, he has presented work at Nuyorican Poets Café, The Kitchen, P.S. 122, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Surf Reality, Webster Hall, The Public Theater, Joe’s Pub, Wetlands Preserve, and ShapeShifter Lab, among other venues. The Chicago Tribune described his spoken words as “Walter Winchell on speed” and the New York Times exclaimed him “a performer who literally and figuratively can talk up a storm.”

Tom was a founding member of performing orchestra Coocoohandler, the downtown hit show Uncle Jimmy’s Dirty Basement – and the New Noise Continuum, which has recently been creating fresh music at Artfarm Recording, in Accord, New York. Other collaborations include Loop 2.4.3, saxophonist Elliott Levin, composer/ pianist Istvan Peter B’Racz, and EK Duo – creating New Music compositions and exploring mixed-genre improvisational electronic and acoustic performances.

His eclectic background includes everything from directing large-scale theatre events to one-man puppetry theatre, receiving best show awards at the National Puppetry Festival in 2013 for ‘Lunatic Cunning’ with co-creator James Godwin. He’s also a teaching artist who has worked with thousands of children of all ages during the past 27 years, exploring the creative process through music, words, visual and theatre arts.

Catherine ‘Cat’ Rutgers

Catherine ‘Cat’ Rutgers lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she watches the sky and digs in the dirt. She is a big fan of making all-original art for music and with musicians, including video, projection, and print. Her spoken word début was at the First Amendment Festival, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1990 – most recently she performed with Life Stories (EK Duo & Guests) at ShapeShifter Lab, May 2024.

Featured reader at: the Baggot Inn, Bardavon 1869 Opera House, CBGB’s Record Canteen, Le Poeme, No Bar, Rainy Days Café, The Right Bank, Under Acme, and Upfront Muse. Participant in poetry readings and slam events at: ABC No Rio, Bowery Poetry Club, Brownies, Cafe Nico, Cedar Tavern, Detour, Fales Library NYU, King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, Medicine Show Theater, Nuyorican Poets Café, and Woodpeckers Tap Dance Center and Interarts Space.

Her poems have been published in Big Fish, The Curse, HART: A Tome for the Arts, The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side, New Observations, TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), and The Writing Self: Journeys into the Act of Writing. Continuously wrangling with contradictions, Ms. Rutgers is founder and president of the Fabulous Underachievers Club (F.U.C., “We may not rule the world, but we do rock the house”) a public service organization sponsored by Space Monkey-French Kiss Productions.

Catherine has deep roots in the Mid-Hudson Valley, is a proud alumnus of Poughkeepsie High School, lived in an apartment on Main Street after graduating from SUNY Purchase, and subsequently opened the Shifting Sands cooperative art gallery in downtown Poughkeepsie. In 1979, she curated ‘Women Artists in the Community’ at Vassar College Center Gallery, and was delighted to have solo shows of paintings, collage, and prints at the Bardavon (1985 &1989), the Cary Arboretum (1987), and Cunneen-Hackett Arts Center (2005). She is permanently in love with this astonishingly beautiful region.

Thomas Kozumplik

Thomas Kozumplik is involved with a wide range of music as creator, producer, collaborator, and freelancer. He co-founded the art/ improv group Clogs and artist-owned record label Music Starts From Silence, and is the artistic director of electro-acoustic percussion ensemble Loop 2.4.3, He was a member of the Yale Percussion Group (dir. Robert van Sice), the Robert Hohner Percussion Ensemble (classical, jazz, world music), the Ron Parmentier Trio (modern and free jazz), and Uncle Jimmy’s Dirty Basement (theatrical multi-media rock and roll).

His performances have been called “dazzling throughout” (Mojo, UK), “sublime” (Pitchfork, USA), “smart and engaging” (New York Times, USA), and “the hit for me” (composer Terry Riley via the New York Times). Gramophone (UK) called Loop 2.4.3’s American Dreamland “an astonishing variety of brand-new yet iconic sounds that create a riveting aura” and praised its “artistic punch.”

Thomas is active as a studio musician and live performer in NYC at venues from Carnegie Hall to ShapeShifter Lab, and is featured on film and video-game soundtracks – as well as more than 20 internationally released albums on the Albany, Asthmatic Kitty, Beggars Banquet, Brassland, Digital Music Products (DMP), and Music Starts From Silence record labels. Collaborators include Reneé Baker, Jonathan Haas, Elliott Levin, Dafnis Prieto, Yuhan Su, The National, Sufjan Stevens, My Brightest Diamond, and The Books.

Based in Brooklyn, New York, Thomas has toured in Europe, Scandinavia, South Korea, and Australia, as well as throughout North America – performed for radio, film, theater, and television, including features on the Learning Channel, NPR, and France Inter Radio – given concerts, clinics, and held residencies at Cornell University, Ithaca College, CalArts, UC Berkeley, Alma College, and Michigan State University, among others – and been featured as a soloist and collaborator at the London Jazz Festival, Sydney Festival, Adelaide Festival, the Barbican (UK), Brighton Dome (UK), Bang on a Can Marathon, Ecstatic Music Festival (NYC), Big Ears Music Festival (Knoxville), the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), World Cafe Live (Philadelphia), and many more.

He has received awards and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, the UK Arts Council, Connecticut Arts Council, Vermont Arts Council, Chamber Music America, ASCAP, Yale University, Notre Dame Jazz Festival, International Association of Jazz Educators, and individual sponsors.