Occasional Jazz Conjectures

Household saints + inspirations: Frank O’Hara, AJ Liebling, Art Lange, Whitney Balliett, Gay Talese and Esquire in the ’60s, Williams Hazlitt and Holden, George W.S. Trow, Seth Sieglaub, Barnett Newman, Otis Ferguson, Jeff Nuttall, Clark Coolidge, Don Marquis (both of them), Manny Farber, Morton Feldman, Roger Shattuck, Edmund Wilson, Ed Dorn, and the year 1959.

TIM DuROCHE is a jazz drummer, writer, and conceptual artist living in Portland, Oregon. For many years he was the jazz writer for the Portland-based alternative weekly WILLAMETTE WEEK (also writing occasionally about dance, performance, classical and world music, literature and cuisine) and a freelance contributor for THE OREGONIAN. His OCCASIONAL JAZZ CONJECTURES have appeared in the Berkeley-based magazine SHUFFLE BOIL, edited by David Meltzer and Steve Dickison. He frequently contributes liner notes to reissues and new jazz releases and has lectured widely on jazz and culture–his most recent talk, Jazz: Danger, Risk, and other Left-handed forms of Human Endeavor was presented at the F & I U Coin Wash Laundromat, as part of Red76 Arts Collective’s “Laundry Lectures” series. He’s a frequent panelist for festivals, arts/culture symposia, and arts grants.

As a jazz artist, he’s played everything from ragtime to no time–creating performances with Beijing Opera musicians, Russian circus clowns, silent film, dance, spoken word, auctioneers, and with installation-performance artists. In addition to leading his critically-acclaimed trio Resolution 57, DuRoche’s worked with a who’s who of West Coast and European jazz innovators, including Paul Plimley-Lisle Ellis, Wally Shoup, Bert Wilson, John Sinclair, Perry Robinson, Mark Whitecage, Phillip Greenlief, Jack Wright, Toshi Makihara, Gust Burns, Alan Tomlinson, Frank Gratkowski, Gordon Lee, Doug Theriault, Torsten Müller, and Damon Smith, among others. He’s appeared as a soloist and featured performer at the 20th Seattle Improvised Music Festival, The Big Sur Experimental Music Festival, Portland Experimental Jazz Festival, San Francisco’s Edgetone New Music Summit,and the Olympia Experimental Music Festivals. DuRoche ongoingly collaborates on site-specific performance and sound installations and conceptual events as part of Research and Development with poet-artist Lisa Radon–which has resulted in sound work and performances for the large-scale visual arts exhibitions Core Sample (2003) and Scratching the Surface (2006), the Portland Design Festival (2004) and for the 2003-2006 Richard Foreman Festivals.

Throughout the 1990s, he lived in Minneapolis where he was involved as a curator in the performing arts department of the renowned Walker Art Center, a freelance writer/editor, and a performer working with Butch Thompson, Cap’n Jack McDuff, Jon Jang/James Newton and Beijing Opera artists Pan Yong Ling, Li Jin Ping, and Li Hong Mei, Douglas Ewart and Carei Thomas of the AACM, George Cartwright, James Samuel “Cornbread” Harris, Sr., poet Tracie Morris, Tiny Tim, and the late performance artist Stuart Sherman, among others.