Meridian presents two concerts featuring guitarist and composer Elliott Sharp. Sharp, who has not performed in the Bay Area since 2005, will present one solo concert on Friday June 10th at 8 PM performing Octal, a collection of pieces for the Koll 8-string guitarbass built exclusively for him. These pieces function somewhere between etudes and jumping off points for improvised explorations. Not at all academic, these performances are filled with free jazz energy and burning bluesy extemporizations using Sharp's signature extended techniques.

On Saturday June 11th at 8 PM Sharp will perform with percussionists William Winant and Mark E. Miller.

Both concerts are $12 general; $10 students/seniors.

Elliott Sharp (b. 1951 Cleveland, Ohio) is an American composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer and curator central to the experimental music scene in New York City for over thirty years. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction. His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; conceptual artist Pierre Huyghe; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; Ensemble Resonanz; cello innovator Frances Marie Uitti; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack deJohnette and Sonny Sharrock; turntablist/video artist Christian Marclay; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jahjouka. Sharp is the subject of a new documentary, Doing The Don't, by filmmaker Bert Shapiro.

William Winant is "one of the best avant-garde percussionists working today" according to music critic Mark Swed (Los Angeles Times). He has performed with some of the most innovative and creative musicians of our time, including John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, Frank Zappa, Keith Jarrett, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, James Tenney, Terry Riley, Cecil Taylor, Gerry Hemingway, Mark Dresser, Barry Guy, Marylin Crispell, George Lewis, Steve Reich and Musicians, Nexus, Charles Wuorinen, Jean-Philippe Collard, Frederic Rzewski, Ursula Oppens, Joan LaBarbara, Danny Elfman/Oingo Boingo, Sonic Youth, Marc Ribot, Keith Rowe, Joey Barron, Bill Frisell, Yo-Yo Ma, ROVA, and the Kronos String Quartet. His own groups include ROOM (with Chris Brown / Larry Ochs / William Winant), CHALLENGE (with Anthony Braxton / David Rosenboom / William Winant), WAKE (with Frank Gratkowski / Chris Brown / William Winant), and the WILLIAM WINANT PERCUSSION GROUP.

Mark E. Miller is a percussionist and vocalist based in the Bay Area. He studied gamelan in Bandung, Indonesia for two years, lived in NYC from 1978-93, playing and recording with Elliot Sharp, John Zorn, Charles Noyes, Michael Beinhorn, Golden Palominos, Arto Lindsay, Fred Frith, Wayne Horvitz, Toykillers, Anton Fier, and many others. Recently Miller has been living in the Oakland area, playing and recording with Henry Kaiser, Larry Ochs, Weasel Walter, Kathleen Supove and many local improvisers. Miller has just completed mixing the new Toykillers record, Awayward, to be released this year.

See photos from the June 10th concert here.