Join Driftwood Quintet featuring poets Sean Avery Medlin and Rashaad Thomas for a powerful performance blending expressive and experimental chamber music with provocative poetry shaped by lived experience and personal perspective.
About the Performers:
Driftwood Quintet: Based in Phoenix, Arizona, the Driftwood Quintet is a chamber group dedicated to crossing genres and bending boundaries in classical music. Through the work of Driftwood’s arrangers, a performance can feature anything from orchestral masterworks or piano works to the imaginative soundtracks from the greatest video games and films. Driftwood also seeks to create memorable experiences through collaborations with artists from a variety of disciplines, ranging from jazz musicians and singer/songwriters to dancers and visual artists. They are the first classical ensemble to be featured on KJZZ’s Tiny Desert Concert Series and have been featured for their original programming in the Chamber Music America magazine article “Rise of the Reed Quintet.” Driftwood recently released their second studio album “El Tango Nuevo: Ángeles y Diablos” which can be purchased online at driftwoodquintet.bandcamp.com or heard on all streaming platforms.
Rashaad Thomas: (he/him) is an award winning poet, writer, and U.S. Air Force veteran living with his family in South Phoenix, Arizona. His work explores race, education, incarceration, and spiritual transformation within the Black experience in America. His writing has appeared in AZ Mirror, The Arizona Informant, AZCentral, New York Amsterdam News, Zócalo Public Square at ASU, Sojourners, and in poetry journals including The Columbia Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review.
Sean Avery Medlin: (he/they) is a rapper, poet, and teaching artist. Their work integrates music, literature, and theater to question the limits of Black masculinity, media (mis)representation, and personal narrative.
About the Composers:
Benjamin Paley:
Benjamin Paley a Valley of the Sun native, is the bassoonist and one of the founding members of the Driftwood Quintet. First arranging music for the marching band in high school, Ben arranged both classical and pop music through his undergraduate career for various ensembles besides the Driftwood Quintet, including from 2011-2012, the bassoon rock band Bocal Adrenaline. Ben also plays bass, performing with big bands and small combos throughout the East Valley, and playing electric bass in his synagogue rock band, the Shabbat-tones of Temple Emanuel of Tempe. As a singer and songwriter, Ben performs and records music with his childhood friend Charles Wanless under the name “other Desert Cities”. Their first album “The History of What’s to Come” was released in 2015.
Briggs Kennedy:
Briggs Kennedy’s (they/them) works have been heard around the greater Phoenix area, coast to coast in the U.S. and in Italy. They founded Oh My Ears in 2013 and currently served as Artistic Director through its formative years. Popular performances of their pieces have taken place at the 2017 Waterloo Regional Contemporary Music Sessions (Canada), 2016 Toronto Creative Music Lab (Canada), the 2016 and 2018 Cabrillo Festivals, the 2014 Rhymes with Opera Chamber Music Workshop, the 2011 Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival, the 2012 and 2013 soundSCAPE Festivals, the 2010 Cortana Sessions for New Music and highSCORE festivals, the 2014 UNK New Music Festival, and the 2015 Carlsbad Music Festival. Briggs is the winner of the AZ Centennial Composer Competition (Judges’ Award, 2012) and the 2009 winner of the Cambridge Chamber Singers’ Annual Choral Composition Competition.
Kevin E. Kerr:
Kwvin E. Kerr (he/him) is a composer and performer based in Phoenix, Arizona. Kevin specializes in chamber music and his projects explore the harmonic spaces in-between tonality and atonality and the juxtaposition of stillness and vital rhythm. His master’s thesis was a collaboration with Grand Rapids, MI Poet Laureate Marcel Price, in which he composed music to accompany Price’s spoken word poetry. Kevin’s works have been performed across the United States. He was named a finalist in the Morton Gould Young Composer Competition in 2015 through 2017, awarded the Franklin G.Fisk Award for his work (self) Reflections, and the WMU Commissioning Competition Award, which resulted in the composition of Murmurations for symphony orchestra. Kevin holds a Master of Music in Composition from Western Michigan University, where he was named an All-University Graduate Research and Creative Scholar for 16/17, and a Bachelor of Music in Composition cum laude from Elmhurst College.
