Thick In The Throat Honey (photo by Jane Portnoff)
Portland, OR-based performance duo Thick In The Throat Honey, Claudia Saleeby Savage (spoken word & movement), and John C. Savage (composer and woodwinds) are known for their unique melding of the disparate and the unexpectedness of each performance whether in an old-growth forest or a high-rise surrounded by urban blight. Morphing the traditions of jazz, spoken word, experimental music, chants, devotional intoning, somatics, and movement, the duo’s work emerges through a spectrum of ensembles from 12-piece jazz band, saxophone quartet, electronically altered chamber music, free jazz mayhem, and percussion jams with their now 10-year-old daughter.
Thick In The Throat Honey's work has been supported by the Creative Music Guild, Portland Jazz Composers' Ensemble, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Oregon State University, and Literary Arts. In 2019, they were among 400 semi-finalists of 6,000 applicants for a Creative Capital Grant for their project about Syrian refugees in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, which uses pieces about individual families and jazz improvisation as a form of giving the finger to fascists.
Claudia Saleeby Savage performs her poem In The Dark Your Anthem Comes, America with the Portland Jazz Composer’s Ensemble (John C. Savage, composer & conductor). June 2nd, 2023, The Old Church, Portland, Oregon.
Click Here to watch the performance.