Stephan Crump’s Passerine

Saturday November 21 * doors at 7, music at 7:30 * $25-30 * TICKETS

Transparent Productions presents …

Grammy-nominated composer and bassist Stephan Crump with an extraordinary new quartet (Ches Smith (percussion), Kenny Warren (trumpet), David Leon (alto flute & saxophone), and Stephan Crump (acoustic bass)) and body of work inspired by the various nest-building techniques of birds.

Their new album Passerine arrives October 23rd on Out of Your Head Records.

Stephan Crump is a bassist and composer, collaborator and bandleader, soloist and educator, based in New York City since 1994. A Memphis native, Crump fell for New York’s fecund scenes during his first semester at Amherst College, when he would drive hours to play late-night, weekday gigs in the West Village. He knew this is where he’d make his life and career. Working beyond genre, he has become a crucial component of multiple New York music communities in and beyond jazz. For two decades, Crump recorded and toured as a third of Vijay Iyer’s acclaimed trio, helping to build that band’s global reputation. He teaches On Magnetism, a course in connecting more deeply through one’s instrument, after a lifetime of doing just that, and lives still in Brooklyn with his wife and collaborator, the singer Jen Chapin, and their two sons.

Originally from Sacramento, California, Ches Smith is a drummer, percussionist, and composer based in New York. He has collaborated with a host of artists on many scenes since the early 2000s. He has nine records to his name as a bandleader that feature his writing and ensemble curation, and is a devout student of Haitian Vodou drums, performing in religious and folkloric contexts in New York and Haiti for the last decade.

David Leon is a Cuban-American saxophonist, woodwinds player, composer, and improviser living in Brooklyn, New York. His work is guided by a persistent search for vitality through autonomy, contradiction, hyperbole, and humor. David was a 2025 Jerome Artist Resident at Roulette Intermedium. In 2024, he was named a Music Composition Fellow by the CINTAS Foundation and was commissioned by Roulette to support the creation of A Divine Echo, a hybrid work of chamber music and nonverbal puppet theatre.

Denver born trumpeter/composer Kenny Warren has been living in Brooklyn since 2006. He has released over a dozen records of his own music which reach across genre but always center some element of improvisation. His latest LP on Out of Your Head Records with his trio Sweet World features Christopher Hoffman on cello and Nathan Ellman-Bell on drums. He is also a long standing member of the Brooklyn brass band institution Slavic Soul Party.