Sharon Udoh at Experimental Sound Studio Live 07-25-2025

In celebration of his latest release, PRO FAKE NO REJECT (Corbett vs Dempsey) Erez Dessel performs a live improvised concert with Paul Giallorenzo and Sharon Udoh using piano recordings from ESS’s Creative Audio Archive as inspiration. Listen to their selections from the archive here: https://soundcloud.com/experimental-s... This event is part of an ongoing ESS initiative to put contemporary artists in direct conversation with archival materials. PRO FAKE NO REJECT highlight Dessel’s bracing approach to the keyboard and deeply intuitive sense of form. With ten concise solo piano tracks summoning references to Cecil Taylor and the Don Pullen/Milford Graves duets, and an almost Russian Romantic darkness – imagine an improvised Mussorgsky – offset by keen emotional intelligence, this music is filled with joyful melodicism and an airborne quality. Sharon Udoh is a Nigerian-American pianist, improviser, and hymnologist. She received her initial training on piano in the Pentecostal church, where the scale of an individual hymn or chorus could extend to 2 hours. Until 2022, Sharon spent her time in Columbus, Ohio, sometimes performing under the name Counterfeit Madison. There, she was a resident at the Wexner Center for the Arts. During that residency, she met director Lars Jan, who recruited her to join his production of Joan Didion’s The White Album. There, she was spotted by Jonathan Snipes of the experimental rap group clipping., with whom she has been recording and performing since 2019, appearing with them on NPR’s Tiny Desk in October 2025. In 2022, she moved to Chicago and became actively involved in the city's North and South Side experimental music scenes. As a curator, she presents “Pianist and A Partner Perhaps”, a piano-focused solo and duo series with featured guests such as Jim Baker, Justin Dillard, Paul Giallorenzo, Anaïs Maviel, Erez Dessel, and Chris Corsano. Sharon is a 2026 United States Artist fellow. Her current projects include The Black Soaps, an episodic opera with Marvin Tate about Black Chicago domestic life; Potluck, her sextet with Fred Jackson, Jr., Avreeayl Ra, Mabel Kwan, Angelo Hart, and Ken Vandermark; Potliquor, her improvised duo with turntablist Allen Moore; [Untitled Blues Project], an adventurous, genre-bending new work exploring buried blues heroes of the past, alongside queer artists writer-performer Paul Outlaw, multimedia composer and guitarist Dudley Saunders, and theater director Sara Lyons; and her ongoing solo hymnal project American-African Hymnal that draws from her deep relationship to hymn literature in the United States.