Electric Squeezebox Orchestra featuring Michael Echaniz at the West Oakland Sessions

Join us on December 10th at the Dresher Ensemble Studio for the world premiere of a composition by Michael Echaniz, performed by the Electric Squeezebox Orchestra. The band will perform the piece commissioned by Jazz in the Neighborhood alongside other originals and arrangements. This free concert is made possible by support from InterMusic SF and the Musicians Union Local 6, register now to reserve your seat!

Michael Echaniz is one of the brightest musicians, composers, and artists emerging from the West Coast. A pianist since five, Michael has studied music at Santa Clara University, California Jazz Conservatory (B.M.), and CalArts (MFA.) Michael is an avid performer, playing and recording alongside internationally-renowned artists such as Jeff Denson, Romain Pilon, Wu Man, Gerald Cleaver, and Friction Quartet in venues such as Black Cat, the Art Boutiki, and Yoshi’s, as well as Umbria and Montreux jazz festivals. Michael has won numerous awards, mostly recently, the 2021 ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Award and a New Music Workshop at the 2022 International Jazz Composers’ Symposium (ISJAC). Supported by InterMusic SF’s 2020 Music Grant Program and New Music USA’s Creator Development Fund in 2022-23, Michael will soon release Seven Shades of Violet (Rebiralost), an ambitious, virtuosic, symmetrical concept album of original compositions and arrangements on Ridgeway Records. Michael’s forward-thinking original music embraces rhythmic complexity, haunting melodicism, fluidity between improvisation and through-composition, influence from disparate styles of classical, world, and pop music, and deep emotional connection.

The Electric Squeezebox Orchestra is a 17 piece big band based in the Bay Area that plays music composed and arranged by its members. Led by trumpeter Erik Jekabson, the band has a monthly residency every second Sunday night at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley that began in March 2018. Before that, the band had a weekly residency at Doc’s Lab in SF from 2014-2018. The E.S.O. currently consists of Erik Jekabson, Erik Andrews, Edward Evans, and Christopher Clarke on trumpets, Rob Ewing, Will Shannon, Patrick Malabuyo and Richard Lee on trombones, Sheldon Brown and Larry Delacruz on alto saxes, Mike Zilber and Marcus Stephens on tenor saxes, Charlie Gurke on baritone sax, Parker Grant on piano, Max Brody on guitar, Josh Tower on bass, and Brian Fischler on drums. However, you’ll catch many of the Bay Area’s top jazz musicians subbing into the band every week, and the band has collaborated with special guests Kalil Wilson, John Santos, Kenny Washington, Spok, Madeline Eastman, Sandy Cressman, Edgardo Cambon, Avotcja, Nicolas Bearde, Mads Tolling and Kellye Gray. They have two CDs out on the OA2 label: “The Falling Dream”, released on OA2 records in 2018, and “Cheap Rent”, released in 2015. Their newest CD, “Matter Is”, on the DoubleOone record label, features their collaborations with guest vocalists Madeline Eastman, Sandy Cressman, Kalil Wilson, and Kenny Washington and poet Avotjca.