Alternating Currents Live presents Michael Zerang for an evening of solo percussion works. Zerang will be joined by Michael Bettine for a piece to close the concert.

Michael Zerang was born in Chicago and is a first-generation American of Assyrian descent. He has been a musician, composer, and producer since 1976, focusing on improvised music, free jazz, contemporary composition, puppet theater, experimental theater, and international musical forms. As a percussionist, composer, and collaborator, Zerang has over one hundred and thirty-five titles in his discography and has toured nationally and internationally to 39 countries since 1981, and works with an ever-widening pool of multi-disciplinary collaborators. Zerang founded and was the artistic director of the Link’s Hall Performance Series in Chicago from 1985–89 where he produced over 300 concerts of jazz, traditional ethnic folk music, electronic music, and other forms of forward-thinking music. He was a Board Member of Links Hall from 1989–2013. He continued to produce concerts at Cafe Urbus Orbis from 1994–96, and at his own space, The Candlestick Maker in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood, from 2001–05. Zerang has taught as a guest artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in performance technique, sound design, and sound/music as it relates to puppetry; rhythmic analysis for dancers at the Dance Center of Columbia College, Northwestern University, and MoMing Dance and Arts Center; courses in Composer/Choreographer Collaborations at Northwestern University; and music to children at the Jane Adams Hull House. He currently holds workshops in improvisational music.

Since 2002, Michael Bettine has worked under the name GONGTOPIA, presenting Sound Sessions and workshops, using gongs, singing bowls, bells, and other percussion. He has written various books on percussion, including his new book, The Way of the Gong—Explorations and Observations in Sound. Michael has also released over forty recordings under his name. His long-running blogs—The Way of the Gong, Art as a Spiritual Practice, and Percussion Deconstruction—have been embraced by both the meditation/sound therapy and percussion communities. As a devoted music educator, he teaches privately, and has presented workshops on gongs at the prestigious Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC) in 2005 and 2012; at the 1st Gong Summit in 2019 and the online Gong Summits in 2020 and 21; at Gong Camp in 2021–23; and at ‘Focus on sound therapy’ in Italy in 2021–23. He also maintains a long running YouTube educational channel.

Alternating Currents Live presents Michael Zerang w/ Michael Bettine