Description

A small leather satchel with four vials of pills and powder accompanied Jane Addams on her expeditions around the world. This travel kit is on display in the settlement house leader and social reformer’s bedroom at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago, along with her Nobel Peace Prize and the thick FBI file that once tracked “the most dangerous woman in America.”

Medicine Kit is based on a site-specific book that lives in Addams’ bedroom next to her travel medicine kit. The text is written – and now spoken – by Terri Kapsalis, with Damon Locks on electronics/sampler and Ken Vandermark on reeds. Part forensic mystery, part experimental documentary, Medicine Kit is a sonic meditation on rest and restlessness, antagonism and peace, domesticity and justice, medicine and poison.

Reference material for this unconventional work includes:”I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” (1914), the first anti-war song to be commercially popular; Lil Armstrong’s “Lonesome Blues” (1926), first recorded in Chicago by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five; “Land of the Noonday Night” (1915), a protest song by Hull-House resident Eleanor Smith, who co-founded the Hull-House Music School; and “Mountains of Alonistena,” a folk song originating in Arcadia, the region from which many Greek immigrants who frequented Hull-House emigrated.

Working together and independently, Vandermark and Locks shaped and adapted the rich sources, extending and augmenting them via improvisation. In the resulting mix, expertly engineered by Alex Inglizian at Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio, Kapsalis integrated her words and spun everything into its final form, a wild, provocative, thoroughly captivating reimagination of the idea of “setting” text to sound.

From 1996-1998, together with John Corbett, Vandermark and Kapsalis performed as an improvising trio called Wounded Jukebox. Their gigs found Corbett spinning records, Vandermark on reeds, and Kapsalis on “reads” (found texts) at venues including WHPK, Lunar Cabaret, and the second Performance Studies International Conference at Northwestern University.

In 2012, Locks and Kapsalis were each commissioned by Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio to create pieces in response to the ESS Sun Ra/Alton Abraham archive. In lieu of solo work, they teamed up and invited Wayne Montana to collaborate on a text-rich sound piece. They then welcomed animator Rob Shaw to create an accompanying visual track for the 17-minute video Noon Moons.

In 2020, Locks and Vandermark began improvising as a duo by way of an invitation to perform at Chicago’s Hyde Park Jazz Festival. They toured Europe in May 2023 and in August 2024 performed at Chicago’s Fred Anderson Park. Though they racked up many stage hours as a duo in a relatively short amount of time, Locks and Vandermark had never been in the studio together until Medicine Kit. Given the magic of what transpired there, we hope there will be more sessions to come.

A collaboration nearly thirty years in the making, Medicine Kit is the first time. 

SOUNDSTREAM

VIEW MORE / BUY