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Chris Pitsiokos and Weasel Walter Open the 2025 New Ghosts Season

Visit the website of Chris Pitsiokos (click on this name and you’ll get there) and you’ll see an image of a blue sky striped with contrails. The saxophonist is no conspiracy theorist, but he is a roaddog, logging 92 shows in 2024. He’s off to a strong start in 2025, too, with a tour that will bring him to the Little Rose Tavern for a duo gig with eruptive drummer Weasel Walter presented by New Ghosts.

Pitsiokos’ feverish schedule took him to three continents last year, including a tour of Asia that made 18 stops in 23 days. Yet, he said on a video call, “I could do more. I want to do more. I would do more if there were opportunities to do more, though I’m trying to also focus a bit on Berlin.”

The Long Island native is now based in the German capital, something he had considered for some time. When the pandemic wiped out his thriving performance career, he said, “I had to decide, okay, do I want to go back to getting a day job or give it a go at being a full-time musician, and the only option for that would be to move to Europe?

“I moved to Berlin and literally in the first week I found myself involved in a small but important venue called Sowieso. In eight months I was one of the people booking the calendar there. And now, after being here three years, with a group of friends, we opened our own venue six months ago.”

While Pitsiokos’ nonstop energy off the bandstand is remarkable, it pales in comparison to the firestorm he creates with his alto saxophone. Given the surface aesthetic of his music, which can seem raucous, confrontational and harsh, it’s tempting to assume that Pitsiokos was a punk kid.

It’s a notion that he refuted with a laugh before acknowledging that “a lot of the people I’ve worked with have been really influenced by that.”

One of them is his duo partner who emerged in the hothouse of the early ‘90s scene in Chicago as a member of two influential Hal Russell projects, the NRG Ensemble and the Flying Luttenbachers.

Walter and Pitsiokos crossed paths when the two shared a bill in New York. “Weasel was there in the front row,” Pitsiokos remembered. “He said, ‘I heard your SoundCloud and I liked it. So that’s why I showed up early.’ And I was kind of starstruck in a way, ’cause I was a fan of his music.”

Walter invited the saxophonist to play a duo gig which he recorded and released as Unplanned Obsolescence. “That was our first record, our first meeting actually,” Pitsiokos said.

But hardly their last. The saxophonist enlisted Walter for the drum chair in his CP Unit where they got down to work. “I remember we had 17 rehearsals before the first gig, which for New Yorkers is, like, a lot,” Pitsiokos said. “These people who are much more established and much older and much busier than I was just gave me the time to learn my music.”

About those 17 rehearsals. While Pitsiokos’ music explodes with near-feral intensity, it is also highly intellectual. The saxophonist studied with the eminent trombonist, composer, historian and theorist George E. Lewis while at Columbia University as did his Wesleyan mentor Tyshawn Sorey, two musicians whose compositional rigor is unquestioned.

“I ended up getting into symbolic logic and also non-classical logics and epistemology, which are fields of philosophy that have to do with very careful logical theorems and dialectic,” he said of his academic career. “And it definitely informs my music, although I would say it’s a counterpoint to my more emotional and intuitive side. I think these two things are really tempering each other.

“Right now, I think that the improvised music scene is a bit lazy in a way,” Pitsiokos said. “There’s a lot of music being made that sounds pretty similar to what was happening 50 years ago. Yet we pride ourselves on being innovative, which is really paradoxical. So we need to kind of use our brains, I think, at this moment in particular, to kind of keep ourselves honest in a way and say, what is this music really doing? What is the purpose? What’s the legacy we’re dealing with and how important is that legacy?”

Good questions, all. As for answers, look for those at the Little Rose Tavern Thursday night.

Chris Pitsiokos and Weasel Walter wsg Speed Kings presented by New Ghosts, Thu., Jan. 23, 8 p.m. Little Rose Tavern, 16205 Lorain Ave, Cleveland, $10 cash at the door.