Anna’s Ghost
Visiting Ensemble, MFA in Music Composition
Profile
The ensemble’s name, Anna’s Ghost, refers to the legend of Anna, the resident ghost of Vermont College of Fine Arts, whose story you can read about here.
Kris Tiner (trumpet)
Lauren Elizabeth Baba (violin/viola)
Brian Walsh (clarinet)
Miller Wrenn (bass)
Profile
Lauren Elizabeth Baba
Lauren Elizabeth Baba is a violinist, violist, composer, arranger, and improviser living in Los Angeles, specializing in performing and composing creative improvised music. As a freelance performer, composer, and arranger, she appears in film scores, commercials, music videos, television, albums, and top touring acts. Baba is composer, conductor, and director of her 17-piece experimental big band, theBABAorchestra and is curator and producer of the music series “Big Band Nights”.
As one of the top up-and-coming female big band composers and bandleaders, Baba has gained critical acclaim and recognition from the creative music scene; including album reviews, interviews, and features [Downbeat/Downbeat Indie Life Feature/JAZZIZ/LA Weekly/All About Jazz….], numerous commissions [Los Angeles Jazz Society’s 2018 New Note Artist Award/ISJAC’s 2022 “Fundamental Freedoms Commission”….], and 2012 ASCAP Young Jazz Composers Award. Baba has self-produced and released 2 theBABAorchestra albums [“Another Ride on the Elephant Slide” 2017/”Marigold” 2019] under her label “Thirsty Owl Records” and is planning on releasing another album next year. She studied improvised music and jazz composition at California Institute of the Arts.
www.LaurenElizabethBaba.com or www.theBABAorchestra.com
Kris Tiner
Kris Tiner is a trumpet artist, composer, and educator active on the West Coast jazz and creative music scene for over 25 years. His playing has been described as “extraordinarily inventive” in Signal to Noise Magazine, “perfectly suited to the moment” in DownBeat, and the LA Weekly states that “trumpeter Kris Tiner can turn barbed wire to beauty.” His music has been performed on five continents, his 90+ recordings have been enthusiastically reviewed in the international jazz press, and he has performance credits on MTV, NBC, PBS, and Comedy Central. Tiner has received awards from ASCAP, the American Composers Forum, Chamber Music America, Montalvo Arts Center, the Kennedy Center, CMEA, KCMEA, and the Levan Center for the Humanities. He has toured widely as a member of the Empty Cage Quartet with recordings on Portugal’s Clean Feed label, and he collaborates with guitarist Mike Baggetta in the duo Tin/Bag.
Tiner also performs with the Cathlene Pineda Quartet, Chris Schlarb’s Psychic Temple, the Industrial Jazz Group, and the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra. He has collaborated with Wadada Leo Smith, Vinny Golia, Kraig Grady, Tatsuya Nakatani, Nels Cline, Jeremiah Lloyd Harmon, Lukas Ligeti, Joe La Barbera, Donald Robinson, Lucian Ban, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Lisa Mezzacappa, Sara Schoenbeck, Harris Eisenstadt, and many others. Tiner is Professor of Music and Director of Jazz Studies at Bakersfield College, and has also taught at California Institute of the Arts, CSU Bakersfield, and Taft College. He holds an MFA in African-American Improvisational Music from CalArts, where his teachers included Wadada Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Edward Carroll, and Charlie Haden. Tiner is the founder of Epigraph Records, an independent label dedicated to the documentation of new creative music recorded in Bakersfield.
Brian Walsh
Brian Walsh is a musician who is interested in sound and communication, regardless of genre. He specializes in performance on the clarinet, bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet. He seeks to redefine the role of these instruments in contemporary classical music, jazz, and world music.
Described as “spectacular” by the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Walsh frequently performs with such diverse groups as Wild up Modern Music Collective, Brightwork New Music, gnarwhallaby, and the Josh Nelson Discoveries Project. He also leads Walsh Set Trio, a jazz ensemble focusing on the performance of his own compositions. Performances have taken Walsh to Japan, Canada, Italy, England, the Netherlands, Iceland, and all over the United States.
As a member of the contemporary music ensemble gnarwhallaby, Mr. Walsh gave the premier of Nicholas Deyoe’s Lullaby 4 at Carnegie Hall. Their Carnegie Hall performance was described as “startlingly versatile” by the New York Times. Mr.Walsh has also performed as a guest artist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella new music series at Walt Disney Concert Hall. He has also collaborated with Monday Evening Concerts, Hear Now Festival, Partch Ensemble, The Industry and Jacaranda.
Walsh has premiered pieces by Luigi Nono, Anne LeBaron, Girard Grisey, James Newton, Andrew Nathaniel McIntosh, Tom Johnson and many others. Past collaborators have included Wayne Shorter, Peter Maxwell Davies, Meredith Monk, Vinny Golia, Gavin Bryars, Bobby Bradford, Bright Eyes, San Fermin, James Newton, Andrea Bocelli and Muhal Richard Abrams.
Miller Wrenn
“One of Los Angeles’ most fearless improvisers,” Miller Wrenn is a Los Angeles-based bassist and composer-improviser who “brings technical mastery and fresh energy to every performance.”(Vernacular New Music). He works primarily in the fields of new, creative, and improvised music, in addition to his work as a composer for film. His most recent film scores can be heard on the 2024 film Exposure (dir. Peter Cannon) and the upcoming thriller Haze (dir. Matthew Fifer).
He leads a variety of groups, including the Miller Wrenn Large Ensemble, which specializes in performances of “conduction,”a tradition of conducted improvisation developed by Butch Morris, and the chamber ensemble wave’particle’wave, which performs his works inspired by/derived from energetic models in nature including gravitational/orbital systems and radioactive decay.
He performs and records frequently in a wide variety of contexts and has been fortunate to do so with artists/groups such as Vinny Golia, Lauren Baba, Eyvind Kang, Tina Raymond, Kris Tiner, Steph Richards, Dan Rosenboom, Alex Cline, Vicki Ray, GE Stinson, The Industry Opera, Bridge to Everywhere, and many others.
Miller has been Bass Performance faculty at Bakersfield College since 2019.