Rose City Book Pub is more than thrilled to host Notes and Motes: Improvised Jazz with Surreal Poetry on July 21st at 7:30 pm. Swing on by to catch some freeform tunes and listen to some poetry with an edge.

Notes and Motes: The Vlatkovich Trio Plus One

Michael Vlatkovich – trombone

Chris Lee – percussion

Shao Way Wu – bass

Casey Bush – poetry

Michael Vlatkovich has produced over 20 CDs as band leader and composer. He has collaborated with musicians, poets, and conceptual artists. He is an emotionally charged performer expressing raw power and beauty in a minimally structured format. He has worked with many poets including Lisa Gill, Dottie Grossman, Anna Holmer, Chuck Britt, Bill Roper and Mark Weber. Vlatkovich holds duel citizenship between Portland and Los Angeles and has played with a wide variety of singers and instrumentalists including Peggy Lee, Brian Setzer, Bryan Adams, Bobby Bradford and Gerry Hemingway. His most recent CD is “With Your Jazz Cat” Julius Ivory Music (2021).

Chris Lee is a composer, drummer and vibraphonist and has worked with Joe Henderson, Lew Tabackin, Fred Hirsch and Ron Miles. Lee attended PSU where he was in a percussion ensemble under the direction of Tomas Svoboda. He also attended Ornette Coleman's Creative Music Studios where he studied with Jack DeJonette and Carl Burger on vibes and drums and also at the Cornish Institute with Sam Rivers and Dave Holland. Lee has toured the United States with his wife cellist Colleen O'Brien performing a program entitled “Where Words and Music Meet”.

Shao Way Wu was born in Hong Kong, moved to the Bay Area as a teenager and lived many years in Humboldt County before making Portland his home. He has recorded his compositions with the band Salting that includes local musicians Randy Porter on piano and Jason Palmer drums. Wu has appeared most recently in a string bass duet with Ed Bennett and with the Rich Halley quartet.

Casey Bush is a long time Portland poet who has performed his work at the Crystal Ballroom, Satyricon, Artquake, the North by Northwest Festival, First Unitarian Church, Powell's City of Books, Goatfest, Cafe Lena, Seattle Poetry Festival and the Portland Poetry Festival. He is a journalist, essayist, biographer, and for15 years was the Senior Editor of the Bear Deluxe, the Northwest's finest environmental art's magazine. He currently reviews jazz CD's for Audiophile Audition. His 8th collection of poetry “Student of the Hippocampus” was published in 2018 by Last Word Press, Olympia, Washington. Novelist/screenwriter Jon Raymond has written about that collection “These are poems that arise bearded and barefoot from the raw American earth. They are by turns sacred, profane, political, gnomic and free.”