JAM01 is a provocation to occupy and make the most out of empty space. Starting with silence and a blank canvas, Kaixi and Joe will improvise and play off of each other to compose and create from pure inspirational energy.

This is a participatory performance, you are invited to bring drawing and sound-making gifts and contribute colors and sounds. Kaixi and Joe will act as unifying forces, creating harmonies between disparate and external interventions. The resulting piece will be a complete multimedia sensory surprise.

The performance will be recorded and will last around one hour. Please consider donating some amount to cover for material and travel costs.

Joe Block is a pianist, composer, arranger, educator, musical director, and bandleader based in New York City. Originally from Philadelphia, Joe started playing classical piano at the age of two before beginning his jazz education in middle school at the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts. A recent graduate of both the Juilliard School (MM '22 Jazz Studies) and Columbia University (BA '21 American Studies), Joe has worked with Wynton Marsalis, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Leslie Odom Jr., Chris Potter, Maria Schneider, Victor Lewis, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Alvin Ailey Dance Company, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Hailed by Jazz at Lincoln Center as one of "jazz's most promising young composers'', Joe has written or arranged music for the JALC Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra, the Wynton Marsalis Septet, saxophonist Grace Kelly, baritone Kenneth Overton, and of course his own group, the Joe Block Quintet. He appears on the 2020 Grammy-nominated album "The Intangible Between" by Orrin Evans and the Captain Black Big Band, and has studied under many esteemed pianists, including Ted Rosenthal, Marc Cary, Geoffrey Keezer, Bruce Barth, and the late, great Frank Kimbrough. Joe maintains a busy performance schedule both as a bandleader with his trio and quintet and as a versatile sideman for a variety of projects and artists.

Kaixi (pronounced kai-Shee, born Katherine in 1998,) is a polymathic artist and climate interventionist from Auckland, New Zealand.

Inspired by Chinese calligraphy, jazz, natural phenomena, and the question of free will, artist Kaixi Yang flows & composes - making sense of what just happened, when is 'complete', and all throughout, 'what is'.

Kaixi has shown in exhibitions internationally, and is an award winning painter & designer.

She studied Product Design at Stanford University, where she cofounded ArtX, a creative collective bridging art & technology for ethical inquiry. She is the cofounder & CEO of ENTITY, a systems design consultancy for the health of people & planet. Her systems change methodology has had chance to grow in various communities - the Interact Fellowship, and the World Economic Forum Global Shapers.

By practicing calligraphy in my own way, outside of the realm of language, I've been able to better make peace with my emotional states.
I have learned to appreciate that the output can never be perfect. Both the good and bad in you is boiled down to the moment you chose to create.
The whole composition comes out - the harmony & discordance.
It all just is.

- Kaixi Yang