Photo of Michael Moss by Scott Friedlander

Friday Sept 5, 2025 at 7pm

Westbeth Community Room
155 Bank Street
(enter through courtyard)
New York, NY 10014

ROOTS to SHOOTS:
Warren Smith, Alexis Marcelo, Adam Lane, Jackson Krall

Michael Moss/ROOTS to SHOOTS is a stellar band playing music from the classic bag of modern jazz composers ranging from Eric Dolphy to John Coltrane, Bill Evans to Duke Ellington, and original compositions by Michael Moss. Moss (tenor and soprano sax, bass clarinet, flute) will be joined by his old buddy Jackson Krall, Cecil Taylor’s long-time drummer, jazz icon Warren Smith on vibes, amazing bassist Adam Lane, and fantastic keyboard player Alexis Marcelo who will be breaking in Westbeth’s new Baldwin 9 foot concert grand piano!

“…powerful, amazing, unique, genuinely creative music”
Ron J. Pelletier, Jazz from Gallery 41, Berkeley, CA

MICHAEL MOSS
Reed player/composer, Michael Moss has been actively involved in the music scene for many years leading his own musical groups: Bows Ensemble for Strings and Piano, ROOTS to SHOOTS, the Accidental Orchestra—a 22-piece renaissance jazz orchestra, Four Rivers, and Free Energy. Numerous grants include Meet the Composer, NYSCA, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and CREATE Council on the Arts. His record label, Fourth Stream Records, has produced multiple LPs, cassettes, and CDs including HELIX, Intervals, Free Play, Dream Time, In Between Gigs, Pyramid, Upstream, Cross Current, Live at ACIA. Performances and commissions are wide-ranging— Little Island, Bridge Street Theatre, Turks and Caicos Arts Foundation, Isthmus Jazz Festival, New York Loft Jazz Celebrations, New York Musicians Festival, Revelation Gallery, St John’s in the Village, Jazzmania, Studio Rivbea, Environ, Joe Lee Wilson’s Ladies Fort, Central Park Bandshell, Space For Innovative Development, Stockton State College, SUNY at Stony Brook, and Borough of Manhattan Community College. He curated and performed in Loft in the Sky Jazz Festivals and multiple Westbeth Music Festivals. Collaborations include work with electroacoustic composer James Dashow, choreographer Judith Moss, storyteller Regina Ress and playwright Domnica Radulescu.

Moss composes music reminiscent of different cultures in order to deeply explore cultural traditions without appropriating those cultures, learning Persian scales of Iran and Iraq, musical scales of Turkey, Armenia, and the Balkans, Greek modes, Israeli and klezmer scales, Japanese and Chinese pentatonic modes, plus scales and meters used in classical ragas of India so as to get inside the music. He plays non-western instruments, playing Indian cane flutes he bought in New Delhi, India, the Thai khean bought in Bangkok, Thailand, plus odd Peruvian pan flutes and penny whistles.

Moss released records beginning in the 1970 on his independent record label, Fourth Stream Records, and produced three lps featuring Four Rivers—Upstream, Cross Current, and Live at ACIA. I went on to drop multiple cassettes and cds and digital releases.

The latest releases, beginning in 2015, feature the New York Free Quartet with pianist Steve Cohn, bassist Larry Roland, and drummer Chuck Fertal: Dream Time, In Between Gigs…Can You Dig?, and Free Play. He appears with guitarist Billy Stein on Intervals. This year Moss is dropping a 4 cd/digital box set including everything ROOTS to SHOOTS and Ensemble Bows in all of its iterations have recorded entitled Quantum Butterfly.

Michael Moss holds a Ph.D. in psychology.

WARREN SMITH
Warren Smith was born May 14, 1934, in Chicago, Illinois, to a musical family.[1] His father played saxophone and clarinet with Noble Sissle and Jimmie Noone, and his mother was a harpist and pianist. At the age of four Smith studied clarinet with his father. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1957, then received a master’s degree in percussion from the Manhattan School of Music in 1958.

One of his earliest major recording dates was with Miles Davis as a vibraphonist in 1957. He found work in Broadway pit bands beginning in 1958 when he was in the original production of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. WIS also played with Gil Evans that year. In 1961 he co-founded the Composers Workshop Ensemble. In the 1960s Smith accompanied Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Lloyd Price, and Nat King Cole; he worked with Sam Rivers from 1964–76 and with Gil Evans again from 1968 to 1976. In 1969 he played with Janis Joplin and in 1971 with King Curtis and Tony Williams. He was also a founding member of Max Roach’s percussion ensemble, M’Boom, in 1970.

In the 1970s and 1980s Smith had a loft called Studio Wis that acted as a performing and recording space for many young New York jazz musicians, such as Wadada Leo Smith and Oliver Lake. Through the 1970s Smith played with Andrew White, Julius Hemphill, Muhal Richard Abrams, Nancy Wilson, Quincy Jones, Count Basie, and Carmen McRae. Other credits include extensive work with rock and pop musicians and time spent with Anthony Braxton, Charles Mingus, Henry Threadgill, Van Morrison, and Joe Zawinul. He continued to work on Broadway into the 1990s, and has performed with a number of classical ensembles.

Smith taught in the New York City public school system from 1958 to 1968, at Third Street Settlement from 1960 to 1967, at Adelphi University in 1970–71, and at SUNY-Old Westbury from 1971.

ALEXIS MARCELO
Alexis Marcelo is a pianist who creates a soulful New York City sound. He instinctively delivers a sound representative of a wide range of influences. His training began at the Harlem School of the Arts learning from JD Parran (AACM) and continued at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he studied composition with Yusef Lateef.

Alexis Marcelo benefitted greatly from growing up in New York City as a black Latino. He was exposed to Hip Hop, Rock, Salsa, Merengue, and Gospel music. His studies led him to the greats in African American music where he fell in love with Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Wayne Shorter.

The unique sound of Alexis Marcelo comes from all of these influences and aims to capture the soulful expression of man. He’s performed overseas and domestically at various festivals and prestigious venues. They include the North Sea Jazz Festival (Holland-Yusef Lateef), the Detroit Jazz Festival (Yusef Lateef), Etnafest (Italy-Yusef Lateef), Mediawave Festival (Hungary-The Hub), Alice Tully Hall in New York City as well as multiple tours to Germany, Poland, United Kingdom, and Denmark.

He has also recorded multiple albums with former professor and mentor Yusef Lateef. He has just recorded his first album (coming out in 2019) and can be heard on current recordings with Adam Rudolph’s Go Orchestra & Moving Pictures, and a new recording with Malcolm Mooney (Can). Alexis Marcelo is a very unique pianist who looks to provide a soulful experience.

ADAM LANE
Composer/Bassist
By combining a disparate set of influences into a unique and personal improvisational voice, Adam Lane has become recognized as one of the most original creative voices in the New York improv scene. He is the leader of several different ensembles that perform his original creative music compositions. His most recent projects include The Adam Lane Trio, featuring legendary reedist Vinny Golia, Four Corners, a co-lead ensemble with reedist Ken Vandermark, The Full Throttle Orchestra (both West and East coast versions), formed to perform Lane’s large group music for improvising orchestras, and an ongoing solo project that combines unique processed double bass improvisations with Lane’s original story telling. Sam Prestiani of Jazziz says of Lane’s writing: “His confidence and confrontational prowess as well as his abiding sense of lyricism and heavy-groove power place him in the lineage of forward-jazz adventurism.”
Lane is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the Julius Hemphill award for large ensemble jazz piece, several meet the composer awards, and a Paternings Scholarship award for study at the Darmstadt School for New Music where Lane studied double bass with Steffano Scodanibbio, and attended master classes in composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen.

As a sideman he has performed with an eclectic mix of musicians, from tenor great John Tchicai, to alto iconoclast Richard Tabnik, to rock legend Tom Waits, plus Steve Cohn, Michael Bisio, Lou Grassi, Perry Robinson, Julian Priester, Blaise Siwula and Burton Greene, Mark Whitecage and Kalaparush Maurice McIntyre as a co-leader. As a leader he worked with Avram Fefer, Roy Campbell, Barry Altschul, Tayler Ho Bynum.

JACKSON KRALL
Born December 10, 1949, Detroit, Michigan, growing up there and in Wisconsin. Drummer Jackson Krall has been an active member of the NYC Avant Jazz scene since the mid 1970’s. Mark Hennen and John Blum have been his musical collaborators, individually and together, for decades. Jackson has also played drums in performance with high-profile avant jazz musicians such as Bill Dixon, Alan Silva, Karen Borca, William Parker, J.D. Parran, Jemeel Moondoc, Rob Brown, Steve Swell, and many, many more, as well as choreographers Elaine Shipman and Kay Nishikawa, and his own group “The Secret Music Society”. He was a frequent drummer of choice for the iconic pianist Cecil Taylor for 20+ years and served on the faculty of Bennington college while under the tutlige of Profs. Bill Dixon, Milford Graves and choreographer Judith Dunn, just prior to moving to New York in 1975. In the 1980’s he was a founding member of the largest of its kind in NYC, Empire Loisieda Escola de Samba. He is also known as a maker of drums, bells, and other instruments and has created a series of sound sculptures dedicated to the memory of Sun Ra.

m2moss11@gmail.com
www.m2Theory.com
https://michaelmoss.bandcamp.com

First Fridays Music is a curated free monthly live music event open to the public and is sponsored by the Westbeth Artists Residents Council and Westbeth MusicWorks.