Several recent releases by Jon Irabagon are reviewed.
Moraine’s Metamorphic Rock (Live at NEARfest 2010) will be out soon on Moonjune Records.
Composer and musician David Bedford has passed away.
Output:noise is releasing a fully improvised score directly influenced by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV).
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From Touching Extremes:
STEVE BERESFORD / STEPHEN FLINN / DAVE TUCKER – Ink Room
HARRIS EISENSTADT – September Trio
From Free Jazz:
Deric Dickens – Speed Date (Self Published, 2011) ***
Ehran Elisha & Roy Campbell – Watching Cartoons With Eddie (Outnowrecordings, 2011) ****
DuH – In Just (Red Toucan, 2011) ****
Nina de Heney – III (Found You Recordings, 2011) ****½
William Parker – Solo Bass/Crumbling In The Shadows Is Fraulein Miller’s Stale Cake (AUM Fidelity, 2011) ****½
The Spanish Donkey -XYX (Northern Spy, 2011) ****
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From Angel City Arts
Wednesday, October 5, 8pm
Royal T, 8910 Washington Blvd., Culver City
Slumgum with Special Guest Dwight Trible
Vocalist Dwight Trible collaborates with Slumgum, for an memorable evening of adventurous music. Slumgum is: Jon Armstrong, Tenor Sax; Rory Cowal, Piano; Dave Tranchina, Bass; Trevor Anderies, Drums.
From FaceBook Events
Thursday, October 6, 7pm
The Battery Books and Music, 1005-b Mission St., South Pasadena
A new trio, Base 4, plays Jazz standards interpreted in somewhat ‘free’ style. Derek Bomback – guitar, Alan Cook – Drums, Bruce Friedman – trumpet.
From MetalJazz.com
Thursday, October 6, 9pm
The Mint, 6010 West Pico Blvd., LA
Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey carry their eruptive ambition to the realm of concept album with their new “Race Riot Suite,” simultaneously old-timey, modern and autobiographical. A horn section featuring Peter Apfelbaum augments the quartet to reproduce the record.
From FaceBook Events
Thursday/Friday, October 6/7, 8pm
Wind Tunnel Gallery, Art Center South, 950 South Raymond Avenue, Pasadena
AxS Festival 2011 presents:
IGNITE / FLOW, Curated by Steve Roden
three commissioned works by Mark So, Yann Novak / Robert Crouch and Carole Kim
CAROLE KIM – direction/video installation, OGURI + ROXANNE STEINBERG – dance, AARON DRAKE – sound, JESSE GILBERT – video processing, MOSES HACMON – live-feed video, BILL BALLOU – co-technical direction / design, JANELLE WEATHERFORD – co-technical direction / lighting designFriday, October 7, 9pm
Bootleg Theatre Bar, 2220 Beverly Blvd., LA
The Bootleg Theatre presents Chicago’s Mucca Pazza, and Los Angeles’ own Timur and the Dime Museum, and AK and Her Kalishnakovs in concert.Saturday, October 8, 1pm
Inner-City Arts, 720 Kohler St., Los Angeles
World Festival of Sacred Music, Los Angeles presents:
Right Here, Right Now: Cristian Amigo and Surrealestate
In an exhilarating synthesis of styles and sounds, New York composer-guitarist Cristian Amigo joins Los Angelenos Surrealestate for the premiere of Amigo’s Right Here, Right Now, written specially for the long-standing L.A. music collective. This improvisational piece focuses on the mindful and empathic experience that performers and audiences share as they both shape and transform the music. With group passages, individual solos, extended techniques and electronics, Right Here, Right Now encompasses multiple artistic and cultural perspectives, overlapping planes of time and space. Surrealestate is: Jonathon Grasse – electric guitar, David Martinelli – percussion, Jeff Schwartz – bass; Charles Sharp – winds and small instruments. New music champion Gustavo Aguilar joins the ensemble on drums and percussion.Saturday, October 8, 9pm
Zephyr Cafe, 340 East 4th St., Long Beach
Alan Cook – drumset/percussion with Steuart Liebig – bass guitars/applied tools and technology
From SundaysLive.org
Sunday, October 9, 4pm
The Broad Stage, Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center, 1310 11th St., Santa Monica presents:
Portals: A Multi-Media Exploration of Longing in the Digital Age
Performances by TIM FAIN violin, and appearing on screen: NICHOLAS BRITELL, piano; FRED CHILD, spoken word actor; CRAIG BLACK / JULIA EICHTEN / HAYLEE NICHELE, dancers. Composers featured in this event include Philip Glass, William Bolcom, Aaron Jay Kernis, Nico Muhly, and Kevin Puts.
From Angel City Arts
Tuesday, October 11, 9pm
Blue Whale, 123 astronaut E S Onizuka St. Suite 301, downtown LA
Angel City Arts and the Blue Whale present the New York avant-jazz quartet Endangered Blood, featuring Chris Speed on Tenor Sax, Oscar Noriega on Alto Sax and Bass Clarinet, Trevor Dunn on Contrabass, and Jim Black on drums.
From SASSAS
Wednesday, October 12, 8pm
Human Resources LA, 410 Cottage Home St., LA
SASSAS and Human Resources LA present: AD HOC #3: Tim Feeney, Vic Rawlings, and Casey Anderson
Tim Feeney and Vic Rawlings have performed together as a duo since meeting within Boston’s “lowercase” improvising community in 2005. Their music explores an unpredictable relationship with making sounds, achieved by elaborate preparation and extension of acoustic soundboxes, such as drums or cello, and expanded via original electronic instruments, ranging from naked circuitboards to amplified kitchen objects. Casey Anderson is an artist working in a number of media, including composition, improvisation, electronic music, saxophone, text, and installations.
From Angel City Arts
Wednesday, October 12, 8pm
Royal T, 8910 Washington Blvd., Culver City
Angel City Arts presents Dromedary & Tone Drift Trio
Dromedary is: Ross Hammond, guitar; Steuart Liebig, bass; Alan Cook, drums
Tone Drift Trio is: G.E. Stinson, guitar & electronics; Steuart Liebig, bass; Kris Tiner, trumpet
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From NYTimes.com:
Anthony Braxton sat perched on a piano bench one recent afternoon, hands folded in his lap, wearing an intent but unreadable expression. Angled away from the piano in a no-frills rehearsal space in Brooklyn, he faced the dozen or so vocalists that currently make up his Syntactical Ghost Trance Music Choir. The singers, arranged in a semicircle, were tackling Mr. Braxton’s “Composition No. 256,” staring hard at their sheet music while trying to keep track of their conductor. It was starting to seem as if the piece, a slippery, scalar proposition, were getting the best of them.
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From LA’s Monday Evening Concerts:
Monday, December 5, 2011 at 8:00 p.m.
Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn SchoolKurtag’s Beckett
As immediate, as poignant and as funny as a Beckett play, György Kurtág’s setting of poems by the writer makes for a riveting solo performance. We meet a man at the end of his rope, amid explosions of musical color and grace. Kurtág is an artist who subscribes to Beckett’s formula of reducing everything to its maximum, and so was John Cage in his last decade, creating a music of single notes and harmonies floating in space. A wild viola solo by Heinz Holliger – another composer drawn to Beckett’s verbal landscapes – opens this voyage into inner space.PROGRAM
Heinz Holliger – Trema
John Cage – Seven
György Kurtág – …pas a pas – nulle part…Monday, January 9, 2012 at 8:00 p.m.
Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn SchoolKlaus Lang
One of the most extraordinary works to come out of Vienna in recent years, Klaus Lang’s einfalt. stille. (“simplicity. quiet.”), offers a mesmerizing hour-long venture through cloudscapes of sound created by flute, female voice, viola, and percussion. The performance features a rare appearance by the astonishing Russian singer Natalia Pschenitschnikova. This is music through which we drift, or that drifts through us. “Through concentration on listening,” Lang writes, “we can enter a state of simplicity of mind which is a state of the highest inner clarity or inner silence.”Monday, February 27, 2012 at 8:00 p.m.
Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn Schoolasamisimasa
The radical Norwegian group asamisimasa makes its West Coast debut with a typically edgy program of music crossing boundaries. Two composers from Norway, Trond Reinholdtsen and Øyvind Torvund, power their music with elements from rock and elsewhere, as does the Danish composer Simon Steen-Andersen. The work in each case is urgently contemporary and thrillingly fresh, uncompromising and dramatic. No less unexpected is the music of the British composer Laurence Crane, who makes extreme minimalism weird and scary. Alberto Savinio, brother of the Italian surrealist Giorgio di Chirico, is a forgotten figure rescued.PROGRAM
Alberto Savinio – Le chants de la Mi-Mort
Øyvind Torvund – Neon Forest Spaces
Simon Steen-Andersen – on and off and to and fro
Laurence Crane – John White in Berlin
Trond Reinholdtsen – Unsichtbare MusikMonday, March 26, 2012 at 8:00 p.m.
Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn SchoolJazz Encounters
Music as extreme action; music rooted in popular styles. Work by the wildly undervalued Stefan Wolpe, bouncing out of jazz and the Austro-German avantgarde, frames the program: his brilliant late quartet with trumpet and sax, and his astonishing mid-fifties oboe quartet. Jump to now, and we introduce Peter Ablinger, conjuror of secrets beneath the everyday, with a miniature piano concerto on the verge of silence and a homage to Charlie Parker on the verge of noise. Virtuoso clarinettist Gareth Davis is the soloist in the latter, and also in two pieces by the young East Coast composer Evan Johnson, one of them tracing a line on contrabass clarinet through “Stormy Weather.”Monday, April 23, 2012 at 8:00 p.m.
Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn SchoolA Percussionist’s Art
The late Aldo Clementi, master of the mystery and magic of highly systematic music, is celebrated close to the first anniversary of his death. L’orologio di Arcevia, a spellbinding piece of elaborate clockwork for tuned percussion instruments, is paired with his Madrigale, for piano and tape. Lachenmann’s astonishing percussion solo Intérieur and Kurt Schwitters’ celebrated but rarely performed Ur Sonata, or grandfather of all sonatas, complete the program. Ace percussionist Steven Schick is the featured performer, turning himself inside out for the untamed vocalizations of the Schwitters classic.PROGRAM
Helmut Lachenmann – Interieur
Kurt Schwitters – Ur Sonata
Aldo Clementi – Madrigale
Aldo Clementi – L’orologio d’arcevia
