Samm Bennett

Samm Bennett works as a drummer, percussionist, and electronic music producer while also pursuing improvisation, composition, and vocal performance within avant-garde rock and jazz. His drumming credits encompass collaborations with cellist Tom Cora in George Cartwright’s Curlew, the trio 3rd Person, and saxophonist Kazutoki Umezu. He appeared in Elliott Sharp’s Carbon and co-founded Semantics with Sharp and Ned Rothenberg; Bennett also supplied drums for a double band directed by Rothenberg. Throughout the late 1980s he frequently performed John Zorn’s two-drummer piece with narration, “Hwang Chin-ee.”

Bennett relocated to New York in 1984 and co-founded Bosho the following year; guitarist Hahn Rowe, already a frequent collaborator in projects such as Chunk, later joined the group. Chunk itself operated from 1990 to 1995 under Bennett’s leadership, with him serving as singer and principal songwriter. After the band’s dissolution he and Rowe formed the duo History of the Last Five Minutes, which issued one self-titled recording and toured Europe and Israel. In 1996 Bennett moved to Tokyo, where he launched the acoustic song project Gone Wrong alongside shamisen player Tanaka Yumiko, previously a member of Ground Zero.

Beyond band material, Bennett has scored several silent films, among them 1920s Fleischer Brothers cartoons featuring Koko the Clown. He has long integrated sampling and electronics into live performance, notably in the 1990s percussion-electronics-media ensemble Dent, and continues that focus in the duo GoNoGoNoGo with Haruna Ito. His improvising partners have included Don Byron, LaDonna Smith, Christian Marclay, and Otomo Yoshihide. Bennett has toured extensively across Europe, North America, and Japan; in the late 1990s he maintained the additional songwriting vehicle Tremolo Chapters.