Talk Show with Steph Richards and Qasim Naqvi at Roulette Intermedium

Talk Show with Steph Richards and Qasim Naqvi
Roulette Intermedium
New York, NY
February 26, 2026

Like most jazz musicians—even non-mainstream players like her—trumpeter Steph Richards often plays cosy nightclubs on her visits to New York (from Seattle, where she teaches at the University of Washington).

Yet her Thursday performance—with Talk Show, her collaboration with drummer/keyboardist Qasim Naqvi—was a welcome return visit to the expansive Roulette. The additional space—Roulette is in a converted old Brooklyn theater—allowed Richards to expand her musical palette even further as well as add a multimedia dimension, provided by   "special guest" video artist Steven Wendt. 

Richards—who, in full disclosure, is a friend I have known since she was a kid—employs long, flowing passages in her playing only sparingly. Instead, the trumpeter—whose resume includes work with the likes of Henry Threadgill and Jason Moran—favors short and often chattering phrases and, occasionally, loops of repeating figures, played in conversational exchanges with her collaborators.

At Roulette, while both musicians took solo turns, a good deal of Talk Show's set featured Richards in intimate improvisations with Naqvi. These musical conversations were approachable and often spacious—more amiable chats than fiery arguments. With both players being skilled improvisers, the interactions were engrossing, and none of the engagements outlived their welcome. Naqvi's drumming eschewed sustained and loud grooves, instead sustaining a flow of percussive remarks.

The trumpeter favors enhancing the sound of her horns (she also plays flugelhorn). Past performances have seen Richards employ not only mutes and plungers but the likes of sheets of paper held over the bell to alter the sonics of her instruments.

On Thursday, Richards (literally) added water to her musical recipe, with two bowls of the wet stuff adorning the stage. The liquidity began with Richards, almost shockingly, pouring water into the bell of a horn before playing it. The liquid flowed into the instrument's valves—with little harm done, Richards assured me in a chat after the set—which briefly introduced bubbling overtones to her playing. Then, with Naqvi providing gentle atmospherics on his ARP synthesiser she immersed and removed the bell's opening in the water as she played, yielding musical gurgles that alternated with purer tones played through the air.

Richards also took advantage of the ample theater stage to employ several drums as musical foils. Pressing the bell against a snare drum yielded rattling overtones from the drum's snare wires. An onstage timpani was occasionally struck to create booming notes, but later, with the trumpet bell pressed to its drum head, lent an eerie echo to the horn's sound.

It's all too easy for video enhancements to music to be distracting or at odds with what's being played. But Wendt's images never overwhelmed the music. Instead, he complemented the sonics in tasteful ways, including adding kaleidoscopic collages of stage pictures and abstract representations.

The video artist was very much a third creative partner, sometimes even roaming the stage with a handheld camera to capture unaltered footage while another on a tripod streamed more abstract images. Some of the time, he displayed an image of one of the players, and then reproduced it multiple times, in overlapping and gently psychedelic collages. Here and there, the musicians even goofed along with the effects, as when Naqvi began rubbing his head and Wendt quickly turned the moment into a visual infinity of rubbed heads, eliciting chuckles from the crowd.

In a nod to the band's name, the videos that preceded the performance drew from archival footage, also creatively manipulated, from bygone tabloid talk shows like "Maury" (hosted by Maury Povich). And for her stage entrance, Richards feigned a mock-paparazzi moment by shielding her eyes from Wendt's handheld klieg light. For a musical genre that often takes itself seriously, the video and theatrical touches to Talk Show's set added lightness to the evening. 

You can find a link to Roulette's video of Talk Show's full performance on Thursday further down on this page.