Biography
Dave Rempis is a Chicago-based saxophonist — playing alto, tenor, and baritone — who stands at the center of the city’s contemporary free jazz scene both as a musician of extraordinary range and energy and as the founder of Aerophonic Records, one of the most principled artist-run labels in the field. Over more than two decades of sustained activity, Rempis has built a discography of remarkable size and consistency, documenting an approach to improvised music that combines the high-energy intensity of the Chicago avant-garde tradition with a compositional sophistication and collaborative generosity that distinguishes him from musicians who rely on energy alone.
His saxophone playing draws on the full tradition of the instrument in free jazz — from the power of Albert Ayler and Peter Brötzmann to the melodic intelligence of Johnny Griffin — while developing a personal voice that is immediately recognizable. Rempis plays all three saxophone sizes with equal fluency, shifting between them according to the needs of the ensemble and the demands of the moment, using the instruments’ distinct tonal characters as compositional resources.
His most sustained ensemble work has been with Ballister — the trio with Fred Lonberg-Holm and Paal Nilssen-Love — and The Rempis Percussion Quartet, both of which have produced extensive catalogs of recordings documenting the development of a genuinely original approach to free jazz ensemble playing. More recently, KUZU, his trio with Tashi Dorji and Tyler Damon, has emerged as one of the most exciting groups in contemporary American free jazz, fusing the energy of free improvisation with the intensity of noise rock and the textural adventurousness of experimental music.
Aerophonic Records, which Rempis founded in 2013, is both a practical solution to the problem of documenting prolific and commercially marginal music and a political statement about how musicians can survive in the twenty-first century without ceding creative or economic control. The label’s deliberate refusal to distribute on Spotify, iTunes, or Amazon — requiring direct purchase through Bandcamp or independent stores — is as much a philosophical position as a business decision.
As a founding presence in the Catalytic Sound cooperative, Rempis has helped build an international infrastructure for artist-run music distribution that extends his individual experiment into a collective model. His recordings with musicians across the cooperative — including Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, Elisabeth Harnik, Tomeka Reid, and Brandon Lopez — document an ongoing engagement with the full range of the cooperative’s musical community.
