Statistically speaking and long in the making- based on musical connections and the tens of thousands of hours invested- this Orlando appearance could be argued as a pre-ordained event. Composer and instrumentalist Zeena Parkins made her way down the Hudson River- Bard College to Manhattan in 1984- becoming a ubiquitous component of the burgeoning Downtown music scene.  Ms. Parkins musical flexibility was a perfect overlay for how the Downtown scene was a separate spoke of the Loft Jazz/Free Jazz culture of the preceding fifteen years. While best known as the new music harpist to call, add keyboards, accordion, sampling, electronics processing, percussion and vocals to the credits page.

Looking over Parkins’s discography, her earliest entries are akin to multiple reverse somersaults and twists off a high dive platform. As a member of the chamber rock News From Babel, she was the new kid in an intersection of Henry Cow, Slapp Happy and Soft Machine musicians, on record with the singular and demanding crew of Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Lindsay Cooper, Dagmar Krause and Robert Wyatt twice between 1984 and 1986. Fred Frith’s gravitation to the NYC Downtown happenings including forming the descriptive Skeleton Crew with Parkins and cellist Tom Cora. Excusing the gender-specificity, a Skeleton Crew show was like witnessing three one-man bands often working more than two limbs and voice to a singular end.

Zeena’s improvisational range placed her in the center of the New York scene that centered around 1987 opening of the Knitting Factory on Houston St. The ever-influential Butch Morris Conduction system and John Zorn’s cryptic game piece (the instructions aren’t available without John Zorn there to administrate) Cobra are in her biography, too.

The résumé unfurls and widens as we walk the timeline. The NYC avant-rock of No Safety, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Mark Stewart and Thurston Moore. Aesthetic Vikings such as Pauline Oliveros, Anthony Braxton, Yoko Ono, Björk, Matmos, Elliott Sharp, Christian Marclay and Ikue Mori.

H0LiCOW

Her work draws on a relationship to dance, film, feminism, assemblage, architecture, urbanism, lists, textiles and detritus. In a circuitous path her processes employ sound travel and transformation, tracings, expanded forms of scoring, historical and technical research. She challenges and embraces contradictions and perceived boundaries through a morphing of real and illusionary instruments, the use of multi-speaker audio installations and other extra-musical considerations.