Susie Ibarra

From the closing years of the twentieth century forward, percussionist Susie Ibarra stood out as one of the most versatile, sought-after, and widely roaming figures in contemporary jazz. Working as composer and bandleader alongside her role as drummer, she has continued to generate live, immersive performances that probe rhythmic patterns, indigenous ceremonial traditions, and deliberate exchanges between urban soundscapes and natural environments. Listeners worldwide have encountered her in ensembles featuring the David S. Ware Quartet, the Matthew Shipp Trio, Wadada Leo Smith, John Zorn, and William Parker, among numerous additional collaborators. Early in the new millennium she co-founded Mephista alongside Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori. More than a dozen releases have appeared under her own name, encompassing both solo outings and large-group projects, among them the 1999 Derek Bailey collaboration Daedal, the 2004 Smith date Folkloriko that also featured violinist Jennifer Choi and pianist Craig Taborn. Thrill Jockey signed her in 2018 and issued the trio recording Flower of Sulphur.

Although her birthplace was California, Ibarra spent her formative years in Texas. She later enrolled at Mannes College of Music in New York City and, upon completion of those studies, continued at Goddard College. Her teachers in drumming and percussion included Milford Graves and Vernel Fournier, followed by Denis Charles, with whom she maintained weekly duo sessions during the years immediately before his death in early 1998; Wobbly Rail issued the resulting live document Drum Talk later that same year. Additional experience came through participation in gamelan ensembles of both Balinese and Javanese traditions as well as Philippine kulintang groups. Throughout the 1990s, while based in New York, she assumed the drum chair in the David S. Ware Quartet in 1997 after Whit Dickey departed to lead his own trio, making her recorded debut with Ware, Matthew Shipp, and William Parker on Wisdom of Uncertainty, the first release on AUM Fidelity. During the same period she belonged to the Matthew Shipp Trio, sharing the same personnel minus Ware, and both groups documented material for AUM Fidelity, DIW, Sony, and Hatology. Jazziz Magazine named her Best New Talent of the Year in 1998. The following year she launched her own imprint, Hopscotch, together with saxophonist and husband Assif Tsahar. Having left the Ware Quartet and Shipp Trio, she toured as a duo with Tsahar in support of Hopscotch’s debut release, Home Cookin’. Also in 1999 she formed her own trio with pianist Cooper Moore and violinist Charles Burnham; the group’s initial recording, Radiance, appeared at year’s end. For her first Tzadik outing she assembled a larger ensemble that included the trio members, resulting in Flower After Flower (2000) in the label’s Composer Series. That same year she contributed to two releases by indie-rock outfit Yo La Tengo.

A pair of recordings arrived in 2002: the duo Birds on Incus with Bailey and the Courvoisier project Passaggio that also featured bassist Joëlle Léandre, while Mephista delivered Black Narcissus. She performed on a Tzadik recording of Zorn’s Cobra. The 2003 Tone Time project paired her with Mark Dresser, and she returned to Tzadik in 2004 for Folkloriko. Exceptionally active years followed in 2004 and 2005, during which eight separate recording sessions interrupted an already full touring calendar. Innova released the solo percussion album Drum Sketches in 2007; the next year she held the drum position on Lisle Ellis’s Sucker Punch Requiem: An Homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat. As a member of Smith’s Golden Quartet she participated in the extended work Ten Freedom Summers, which reached the Pulitzer Prize in Music finals in 2013. That year she also played drums and xylophone on pianist Yuko Fujiyama’s Night Wave quartet date alongside Choi and cornetist Graham Haynes. Premieres of her own large-scale compositions occurred at festivals, among them the Earth Day 2013 commission Circadian Rhythms, scored for eighty percussionists and 8.1 surround sound drawn from Macaulay Library field recordings; the 2014 Ecstatic Music Festival commission We Float, created with singer-songwriter Mirah as a sonic narrative of space exploration; and The Cotabato Sessions, a digital music film and album documenting a single family’s kulintang gong-chime legacy in Mindanao, Philippines. In 2014 she was named a TEDFellow. The subsequent year she composed and performed Mirrors and Water, a work and sonic installation created for Ai Wei Wei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Signs at the National Museum of Wildlife Art sculpture trail in Jackson, Wyoming. She joined trumpeter Dave Douglas and guitarist Marc Ribot for the Greenleaf Music album New Sanctuary Trio and created the mobile-app soundwalk Musical Water Routes in the Medina of Fez in collaboration with architect Aziza Chaouni, unveiled at the 2016 Sacred Music Festival of Fez. Two albums appeared in 2018: the February Decibel release Perception, credited to her Dreamtime Ensemble with cellist Yves Dharamraj, electronicist Jean-Luc Sinclair, pianist and guitarist Jake Landau, violinist Choi, and vocalist Claudia Acuña; and the Thrill Jockey trio date Flower of Sulphur featuring Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (aka Lichens) and Japanese percussionist/drummer YoshimiO.