Pending husband-wife team Grex (Karl Evangelista/Margaret Rei Scampavia) performs selections from its newly released album ("Second Marriage," SUA, 2011) and previews the second part of its Filipino-American trilogy--a fantastical exploration of the band's World War II-era ancestry, tentatively titled "Mushroom." The music of "Second Marriage" explores dualities and multiple meanings, utilizing the themes of love and matrimony to ground a synthesis of free jazz, free improvisation, and pop. "Mushroom" takes its cues from musical epics (Marion Brown's Georgia trilogy), Kurosawa, and Doctor Who, upending traditional 20th century narratives with a flair for weirdness and popcorn drama. This performance features both the core Grex duo and an augmented ensemble featuring David Boyce (tenor saxophone) Robert Lopez (drums), Nick Obando (alto saxophone), and Karen Stackpole (percussion).

Grex (greks) n. 1. a multicellular aggregate of the groups Acrasiomycota or Dictyosteliida, formed for the purposes of travel and food collection. 2. a Bay Area creative music partnership composed of Karl A.D. Evangelista (guitar, vox, etc.) and Margaret Rei Scampavia (keys, winds, vox, etc.).

Grex (the band) was formed in and around the Mills College music axis, late night inside jokes, and intense dissections of South African music, emphasizing genre bending, cross-idiomatic conceits and melding elements of mostly everything (Evangelista has a background in free jazz and Scampavia is a biologist) into something stark and eldritch. Elements of jazz, pop songwriting, garage rock, 20th century chamber music, and free improvisation merge to form an idiom in and of itself--"Grex music"--a living, breathing musical entity.