TIM DuROCHE is a Portland, OR-based artist and arts and culture advocate who’s worked for nearly two decades at the intersections of the visual, performing, literary and media arts. He is a jazz musician-composer and conceptual artist fascinated by the slim corridors running between art, utility, entertainment, and civic engagement. In addition to site-specific performances, sound installations, composition, nightclub, and festival appearances, DuRoche is a well-respected jazz and culture writer.
His public art/installation work includes the recent SO. WATERFRONT SOUND COMMISSION, a month-long public art project located at the nascent South Waterfront neighborhood development in Portland that looked at the conceptual corridors of placemaking—centering around projects (WHYTE SPACES, an audio tour of potential geography and 23 ANTHEMS, a commissioning project/live performance) that invited participation and a reorientation with with sound and cityscape.
As a composer and drummer-percussionist, DuRoche’s innovative, conceptual strategies around sound-making have formed the ground for a bevy of intermedia collaborations with dance artists Tere Mathern Dance, Oslund+Co. BodyVox, Cydney Wilkes/Mike Barber, and Linda K. Johnson, spoken word/conceptual artist Lisa Radon, and an extensive array of US and European avant-garde jazz greats.
Over the last decade he’s worked with Beijing Opera musicians, Russian circus clowns, auctioneers, blues legends, performance poets Tracie Morris and John Sinclair, composed live soundtracks for classic silent films by Robert Flaherty, FW Murnau, Dziga Vertov, and Rudolph Valentino among others, and appeared with musical iconoclasts as diverse as Frank Gratkowski, Perry Robinson, Wally Shoup, Paul Plimley/Lisle Ellis, Tiny Tim and Cap’n Jack McDuff. As a drummer, DuRoche currently leads the trio Resolution 57, Comme Il Faut (a project exploring the music of Pulitzer Prize-winner Ornette Coleman) and performs with the cooperatively-led free-jazz ensemble Better Homes & Gardens (featuring Joe Cunningham, Reed Wallsmith, Bob Jones, and occasionally Fred Chalenor).
Since moving to Portland in 2000, DuRoche has been active at the intersections of the visual, performing, literary and media arts and the nonprofit community—including work, projects and collaborations with City Club of Portland, the Northwest Film Center/Portland Art Museum, Literary Arts’ Writers in the Schools program, the Portland Flamenco Festival, Portland Jazz Festival, Creative Music Guild, PICA’s TBA Festival, Performance Works NW, Disjecta Interdisciplinary Art Center, Conduit, the interdisciplinary, city-wide art exhibition Core Sample.
DuRoche is proud to work for the award-winning Gerding Theater at the Armory, home of Portland Center Stage, where he’s responsible for community programs, partnerships and outreach.In addition to his work in the nonprofit arts and cultural advocacy community, he is a member of Commissioner Sam Adams’ Creative Capacity Strategy Committee, a frequent panelist for the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and a freelance arts and culture writer for The Oregonian, among other publications.
