The Interpretations Series 36th season continues with a program featuring baritone Thomas Buckner (who Roulette honors at its 2026 Gala!) and bassist James Ilgenfritz. Longtime collaborators and dedicated improvisors, Buckner and Ilgenfritz will begin the program with a duo performance celebrating the release of their new album Automatic Thinking (Infrequent Seams, 2026). Following intermission, the duo will be joined by bass clarinetist Katie Porter and pianist Eli Wallace for a set of works for quartet that will include texts by poet Yuko Otomo and others.

Presented by Interpretations in partnership with Roulette.

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.

For decades, baritone Thomas Buckner has dedicated himself to the promotion and performance of new and improvised music, collaborating with a host of new music luminaries including: Robert Ashley, Noah Creshevsky, Tom Hamilton, Earl Howard, Matthias Kaul, Leroy Jenkins, Bun Ching Lam, Annea Lockwood, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Wadada Leo Smith, Chinary Ung, Christian Wolff, and many others. Buckner has appeared at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Herbst Theatre, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berlin Spring Festival, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Prague Spring Festival, and the Angelica Festival of Bologna. He is featured on over 50 recordings, including 6 solo albums, the most recent being Spontaneous Musical Invention (Recital, 2023), a double album of rarely heard Robert Ashley compositions. For the past 36 years Thomas Buckner has curated the Interpretations series in New York City.

Composer and bassist James Ilgenfritz is recognized in the New Yorker for his “characteristic magnanimity” and his “invaluable contributions to New York’s new-music community.”  James presented residencies at John Zorn’s The Stone in 2015 and 2017. In 2019 James performed in Anthony Braxton’s Composer Portrait concert at Columbia University’s Miller Theater (with Either/Or and the JACK Quartet), and premiered his second opera, I Looked At The Eclipse. Recent projects include his trio Hypercolor with Lukas Ligeti & Eyal Maoz, and his recent solo CD Origami Cosmos featuring works by Annie Gosfield, Miya Masaoka, Elliott Sharp and JG Thirlwell. James has performed throughout the US, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Poland, and Switzerland. Notable performances include work with composer/improvisers Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, Rufus Reid, Anthony Braxton, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, and many others. James has received grants from New Music USA and American Composers Forum, and he holds degrees from University of Michigan, University of California San Diego and University of California Irvine.

Katie Porter is a clarinetist and curator specializing in experimental music. Passionate about creating musical communities, she co-founded the venue Listen/Space (Brooklyn) and curates the Listen/Space Commissions, responsible for 46 new works for mixed chamber group. She also co-directs the biennial VU Symposium for experimental, improvised and electronic music (Park City, Utah) and is working on a giant multi-year project of experimental works for solo clarinet at Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, a land artwork in remote northern Utah. She has performed throughout the U.S and Europe at venues including Roulette, Issue Project Room, The Kitchen, The Stone, C4NM, Experimental Intermedia, Dogstar (LA), Green Umbrella Series (LA), BLIM (Vancouver), Centre Acanthes (France), Scelciana (Italy), Ostrava Days (Czech Rep), and St Petersburg Art Space (Berlin). Porter has premiered works by composers John Luther Adams, Nomi Epstein, Jürg Frey, Brian Harnetty, Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, Michael Pisaro, Larry Polansky, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, and many others. Her duo, Red Desert Ensemble, can be heard on XI Records, Edition Wandelweiser, The Essential Indexical, and Infrequent Seams. Current collaborations include A Quartet or Two Duos with James Ilgenfritz, Teerapat Parnmongkol and Lucie Vítková, the duo Malosma with flutist Christine Tavolacci, and Phase to Phase with bass clarinetist Lucio Capece.

Eli Wallace is a pianist, improviser, composer, and curator who resides in Brooklyn, NY. He works as a solo artist but also collaborates with musicians in improvised and creative music communities such as Daniel Carter, Ingrid Laubrock, Michael Foster, Sam Newsome, Billy Mintz, Jessica Ackerley, Sandy Ewen, Carlo Costa, Sean Ali, Lester St. Louis, Erika Dicker, Joe Moffett, and others. Additionally, he co-curates the music and art installation series Invocation with Drew Wesely. In 2021 he was very fortunate to be selected as an artist in residence at Casa Wabi in Mexico, where he performed public piano concerts and developed a new system of musical notation. Additionally in 2021 he released the album Precepts, a studio recording of a graphic composition. His work as a pianist spans classical, jazz, and free improvisation, while incorporating contemporary piano performance practice and preparation to create a sound that is uniquely his own. Over the past decade he has appeared on dozens of albums and has performed at such esteemed venues as The Stone, New York, NY, Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago, IL, and the Outsound New Music Summit, San Francisco, CA.