animals & giraffes celebrates the release of live @ medicine for nightmares (Evander Music, 2023) with a concert featuring Kyle Bruckmann and Alexandra Buschman-Román, whoappear on the album; and special guests Chris Cooper, Tom Djll, Danishta Rivero, and Zachary James Watkins. Musician/composer Phillip Greenlief and writer Claudia La Rocco created animals & giraffes after meeting at Headlands Center for the Arts during their 2013 residencies. A never changing ensemble dedicated to interdisciplinary improvisation, a&g has performed at such venues as The Lab (SF), Pieter (LA), Reed College (Portland), Amalgam Presents at Café Mustache (Chicago), and the Chocolate Factory Theater (NYC). In 2017-2018, a&g was ensemble in residence at the Center for New Music, hosting monthly happy hours with musicians, visual artists, writers, and dancers. The group has three albums: July (Edgetone Records, 2017), featuring a who’s who of Bay Area improvisers; Landlocked Beach(Creative Sources, 2018), a live broadcast with Jon Leidecker on Over the Edge at KPFA FM; and animals & giraffes live @ medicine for nightmares (Evander Music, 2023), with Kyle Bruckmann, Alexandra Buschman-Román, and Adriana Camacho.

Since his emergence on the west coast in the late 1970s, saxophonist/composer PhillipGreenlief (b. 1959, Los Angeles) has achieved international acclaim for his recordings and performances with musicians and composers in the post-jazz continuum as well as new music innovators and virtuosic improvisers. He has performed with Wadada Leo Smith, Meredith Monk, Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, and They Might Be Giants. Albums include two LANTSKAP LOGIC TRIO releases (w/ Evelyn Davis and Fred Frith), THAT OVERT DESIRE OF OBJECT with Joelle Leandre, ALL AT ONCE with FPR (Frank Gratkowski and Jon Raskin), and OH THAT MONSTER with LA punk pioneers Thelonious Monster. Recent residencies have included the Banff Center for Art and Creativity, Neue Muzik Koln, and Headlands Center for the Arts. His critical writing has been published in Artforum, Open Space (SFMOMA), Sound American, and Signal to Noise. Claudia La Rocco is the author of Drive By (Smooth Friend); Certain Things (Afternoon Editions); Quartet (Ugly Duckling Presse); The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited); and petit cadeau (published in print, digital, and live editions by The Chocolate Factory). She has received grants and residencies from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Contemporary Art Stavanger, Headlands Center for the Arts, et al. She edited I Don’t Poem: An Anthology of Painters (Off the Park Press) and Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, the catalogue for Danspace Projectʼs PLATFORM 2015, for which she was guest artist curator. La Rocco was a critic and reporter for The New York Times from 2005-2015, editorial director of Open Space from 2016-2021, and now edits The Back Room, a Small Press Traffic publishing program.