Gentle Gazzetta Readers,

I write you, now, from my hotel room in London, just a few short blocks from the Barbican Centre where I’ll soon be giving a solo performance. It’s a shared concert with the “Always, Already There Ensemble”, a chamber group that was assembled just for this festival curated by London-based singer and composer, Elaine Mitchener. Elaine has lovingly planned and programmed the Always, Already There Festival to honor and continue George Lewis’ Afrodiasporic Avant-Garde Incubator Project and mounting it, for the first time, in the UK. This is a weekend packed with music by an extraordinary list of composers including the likes of Ben Patterson, Alice Coltrane, Anthony Braxton, Allison Loggins-Hull, and Olly Wilson – to name just a handful – and I do feel honored to be listed as a headliner on this festival.

Fun with The Wire
This month, I had the very good fortune of being the featured guest for “Invisible Jukebox”, a regular column in one of my favorite publications, UK experimental sound and music magazine, The Wire. I’ve had various appearances in their pages over the years, but this one, for me, was a dream, because I’ve always adored that column. I was “tested” by Marc Weidenbaum, who actually came to my studio in San Francisco to do the fabled needle-dropping. For those unfamiliar, “Invisible Jukebox” is a long-running feature in which a staff writer selects a list of recordings and plays them for the guest, who is expected to identify them, resulting in a fascinating interview/conversation that is then published along with the names of the tracks. My Invisible Jukebox, which appears in the October issue, features a delightful list of titles from artists like Laetitia Sonami, Carl Stone, Maria Callas, and even a Japanese Enka track. I had a wonderful time attempting to identify all of them and chatting with Marc about great music!

Busy Busy Busy
As is my usual, I’m working pretty non-stop to complete several commissioned works that are all nipping at the heels of their deadlines. These include a new choral work for the Peninsula Women’s Chorus, a solo piano work for Sarah Cahill, and a work for chambre orchestra and tape for sfContemporary (AKA the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players). For SFCMP, I’ve been recording a lot of interviews with current and past members of the ensemble, and I plan to incorporate speech fragments from those interviews in a piece I’m calling Generation, which will premiere in the Spring.

Fueling Up on Inspiration
One would think that, in order to compose all of this music, I would need to stay home with nose to grindstone. But, I still continue to attend all the contemporary and experimental music concerts and theater and dance events that I can get to. One might be tempted to say that it’s almost an addiction (”I could stop if I wanted to...”) but, in actuality, it really helps me. It keeps my creative juices flowing, and gets me unstuck, when I find myself blocked. (Which does happen when I’m trying to crank out so many commissioned works!) And so I continue...

Just in the past couple of months I’ve attended all of the Other Minds events (on their 30th Anniversary festival), all of the SFEMF (25th Anniversary) concerts (which I also co-organized), a surprising production of Shakespeare’s King Lear – with music by Paul Dresher and starring Rinde Eckert as “the Fool”, numerous West Oakland Sound Series concerts, and a couple of Roar Shack Live! events featuring The Living Earth Show and collaborators. I also witnessed an excellent work of performance art in the form of an insanely complicated board game invented and performed by “Bucket List” (Mark Applebaum and the Living Earth Show) at SFMOMA.

PZ + Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings 335 & 340

Luciano Chessa in Ramon Sender's Desert Ambulance at the SFEMF Gala"

Blevin Blectum at SFEMF (at The Lab)

Rinde Eckert on the set of King Lear

Thomas Buchner with PZ in the lobby at the Time:Spans Festival

Sarah Saviet and Ty Bouque at the Time:Spans Festival

Bucket List playing the Game at SFMOMAi

Beth Warshafsky standing at the entrance of the Duchamp exhibition.

PZ performing at the Times:Spans Festival

I attended a USArtists convening in North Adams and got to visit the galleries of MASS MoCA and look in on some of my favorite works including the three floors of Sol LeWitt wall drawings and the Julianne Swartz sound piece on the John Cage/Merce Cunningham Bridge featuring the voices of members of Roomful of Teeth.

And, while I was in New York to attend and perform in the Time:Spans festival, in August, I made it a point to see the magnificent Duchamp exhibition at MoMA, and take a quick spin through the Whitney Biennale, as well.

Plentiful Performances
I’m still managing to balance all of this composing and concert-going, with performance engagements, and I have quite a few of those coming up, as you can see from the list at the top of this Gazzetta. Scroll down for the details, and I hope to see you at some of them, whenever they occur in your neck of the woods!

Yours always,

PZ

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upcoming event details:

Pamela Z solo performance in a shared concert with the Always, Already There Ensemble

Always, Already There Festival

Saturday, October 24, 2026, 7:30pm
BARBICAN CENTRE Milton Court Concert Hall

Join us for a night of two halves: the Always, Already There Ensemble presents UK premieres by Charles Uzor, Corie-Rose Soumah and Marisse Cato, then composer-performer Pamela Z finishes the evening with a solo set or works for voice, electronics, and video.

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Jack Sheen conducts the newly-formed Always, Already There Ensemble in three UK premieres of work by Marisse Cato (UK), Charles Uzor (Switzerland) and Corie-Rose Soumah (Canada). Chris Clarke joins as soloist for Charles Uzor’s sumptuous new harp concerto Qualia, while Corie Rose Soumah’s Tossed Lilacs is inspired by small moments of wonder and spirituality, from the taste of clementines on the tongue to the strings of the Kora.

The evening culminates in a rare solo performance of works by legendary American vocal pioneer and electronic artist Pamela Z, famed for making works for voice, electronics, samples, gesture activated MIDI controllers, and video.

Tickets

BARBICAN CENTRE
Milton Court Concert Hall
Silk St, London
EC2Y 9BH
UK

Solo Performance as part of
RENDERED VOICE day of experimental vocal music 2026

Saturday November 14, 2026

The third edition of Rendered Voice, an interdisciplinary day-long festival exploring the voice and vocal music.

A full day of concerts and performances that move across artistic disciplines and explore the voice as both an instrument and a tradition.

Artists:
Pamela Z (US), Jonathan Chaim Reus (US/NL) and Jaap Blonk (NL), Nik Rawlings (UK), Sarah Buchner (DE/DK) and ensemble

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Skissernas Museum
Finngatan 2, 223 62 Lund, Sweden

Pamela Z performing in
Linda May Han Oh's INVISIBLE THREADS

Thursday, January 14, 2027
Joe's Pub

Pamela Z will will perform on voice and electronics as part of an ensemble led by Grammy-winning bassist and composer Linda May Han Oh, in a performance of Oh's five-movement multidisciplinary work Invisible Threads at Joe's Pub in New York.

The piece, which premiered in the Melbourne International Jazz Festival in 2026, will also have a performance in the 2027 Big Ears Festival.

JOE'S PUB
425 Lafayette Street (at Astor Place)
New York, NY, 10003

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Thursday, March 11, 2027, 7:30pm
Kaufman Music Center

Lorelei Ensemble will perform the world premiere Sauvage, a work by Pamela Z as part of Wild, a program of newly commissioned pieces for treble voices, at Merkin Hall in New York.

The evening will include new works by Katherine Balch, Angélica Negrón, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Tina Tallon, and Pamela Z for treble vocal ensemble, which together make up WILD.

Tickets

Merkin Hall
Kaufman Music Center
Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, 1A
00 153 Roma

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Pamela Z performing in
Linda May Han Oh's INVISIBLE THREADS

Friday, April 2, 2027
BIG EARS FESTIVAL

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Pamela Z will will perform on voice and electronics as part of an ensemble led by Grammy-winning bassist and composer Linda May Han Oh, in a performance of Oh's five-movement multidisciplinary work Invisible Threads at the BIG EARS FESTIVAL in Knoxville, TN.

The piece, which premiered in the Melbourne International Jazz Festival in 2026, will have also had a performance in January at Joe's Pub in New York.

Get TICKETS

BIG EARS FESTIVAL
Knoxville, TN
USA

PAMELA Z solo performance at BIG EARS FESTIVAL

Saturday, April 3, 2027
BIG EARS FESTIVAL

Pamela Z will perform a concert of her solo works for voice and live electronics at the BIG EARS FESTIVAL, in Knoxville, TN on Saturday April 3, 2027.

Get TICKETS

BIG EARS FESTIVAL
Knoxville, TN
USA

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sfCONTEMPORARY Premieres new work by PAMELA Z

Saturday, April 10, 2027 7:30pm
Taube Atrium Theater

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PAMELA Z solo works for
voice, electronics, and video

Sunday, April 18, 2027, 7pm
UIS Studio Theater

Pamela Z will perform a concert of her solo works for voice, live electronics, and video at the UIS Studio Theater, on the campus of the University of Illinois, Springfield, on Sunday, April 18, 2027.

University of Illinois
Performing Arts Center
One University Plaza, Public Affairs Center, Springfield, IL 62703
USA

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