Note: To see tour information for the summer 2005 Joint Ops Tour, please scroll down to the Thursday, April 14 entry. Information is changed on a regular basis.
The main component of the Joint Ops Tour is the trio, Dennis González Yells At Eels. This is the history of Dennis, Aaron, and Stefan Gonzalez:
After recording a series of stunning, stellar dates for Silkheart, Koch, Konnex, Gowi, Music and Arts and Daagnim records in the 80's and early 90's - with leaders and sidemen including Charles Brackeen, Andrew Cyrille, Fred Hopkins, Malachi Favors, Carlos Ward, Louis Moholo, Keith Tippett, Elton Dean, Nels Cline, Olu Dara, Nils Petter Molvaer, and Douglas Ewart, avant jazz legend Dennis Gonzalez left the world of music for 5 long years.
He returned in 1999 with a new resolve and a new trio, Yells At Eels. The trio was made up of Gonzalez on trumpets, keyboards, and samples, as well as his bass-playing son, Aaron (who was present at all the Silkheart sessions as child and is now 24 years of age); and his younger son, Stefan, on drums (he is now 19). Aaron and Stefan had worked together in their own grindcore punk duo, Akkolyte, and proposed the trio to their dad. The eight months that followed were a rehearsal for things to come, playing with special guests poet-laureate Yusef Komunyakaa, New Orleans saxist Tim Green, and Dallas-based pianist Scott Bucklin. In January of 2000, they began the recording of their first CD, Home, which was released in June of that same year.
In the next 2 years, the trio would travel all over the United States playing their new sounds for large and small audiences alike - Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Burlington, Portland, New York City, Raleigh, Atlanta, Jackson, New Orleans, Ft. Worth, Houston. Their special guests were truly special: Douglas Ewart, The Micro-East Collective, George Cartwright, Clyde Kerr, Jr., Tim Green, Bill Pohl, James Harvey, Mike Khoury, Travis Laplante, Andrew Lamb, Assif Tsahar, Alvin Fielder, David Boykin.
Their second CD, a double issue, was recorded live in Minneapolis (Home Away from Home with Douglas Ewart and George Cartwright) and in the studio in Dallas and New Orleans (Pictogram with Tim Green, Scott Bucklin, and Bill Pohl). International coverage of this trio has come from Citizen Jazz in Brussels, Echoes in London, Signal to Noise in Vermont, One Final Note in Minneapolis, The Dallas Morning News, Zeitgeist in New Orleans, and many other sources.
After five and a half years of playing, recording, and touring together, they played two nights in Vancouver, British Columbia, with Mark Taylor on French horn, Peggy Lee on cello, and Paul Plimley on piano, and are planning a European summer tour in 2005, after playing the prestigious Vision Festival in New York in June of 2005 with Oliver Lake. They are also in the process of recording a third CD of new material produced by Aaron and Stefan this time around.
These are the bios of the members of the trio, Dennis González Yells At Eels:
Aaron González is a bassist who worked with autistic adolescents at Hillcrest High School and North Dallas High School in Dallas for 3 years. He studied English at Mountain View College and at The University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. For two years, he worked as a bilingual (Spanish/English) ESOL aide at Greiner Middle School in Dallas, Texas. He plays with the hardcore/punk duo Akkolyte with his brother, Stefan. He is also bassist for his father's Tejano/Norteña trio, Trio Brujos. His latest project is his own punk/prog rock quartet, Life-Death Continuum. He worked with the Texas Environmental Consortium, and now works at Breadwinners in Dallas.
Stefan González is a 19-year-old drummer who is a sophomore at Mountain View College, where he is concentrating on Journalism. He attended Arts Magnet High School in Dallas where he studied mallets and percussion. He also attended North Dallas High School where he studied Jazz, Mariachi, and Hispanic Musics. He is the founder of his own hardcore/punk magazine and record label, FxTxFx Productions, and plays drums in Akkolyte. He plays drums in Waking Terror and does vocals for his group Saboteur. He is working on his first jazz recording as a leader, and will work with trumpeter Matt LaVelle in the studio in New York in June.
Dennis González is a musician/composer/producer, visual artist, writer, educator, and linguist, who lives in Dallas and has been active in the international New Jazz scene since 1980. He has played and recorded with many of jazz's luminaries, including Frank Lowe, Charles Brackeen, Malachi Favors, Andrew Cyrille, Keith Tippett, Cecil Taylor, Roy Hargrove, Kidd Jordan, Oliver Lake, and many others. His music can be found on Silkheart Records (Stockholm), Music and Arts (Berkeley), Gowi Records (Krakow), Konnex (Berlin), Koch Jazz (NY), Brut Records (Ljubljana), CreOp (Austin), Clean Feed (Lisbon), 8th Harmonic Breakdown (Chicago), Entropy Stereo (Detroit), and his own label daagnimRecords (Dallas).
