Coming to Philadelphia

Source: Philadelphia’s Ars Nova Workshop.

Thursday, January 7, 2016 – 8:00pm
TOMEKA REID QUARTET
with Tomeka Reid, cello; Mary Halvorson, guitar; Jason Roebke, bass; and Tomas Fujiwara, drums

Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 S. 18th Street
$15 General Admission

Ars Nova Workshop is pleased to present the Philadelphia debut of the Tomeka Reid Quartet, touring in support of its eponymous debut, released in September 2015 on Thirsty Ear.

For the past decade and a half, Chicago cello phenom Tomeka Reid’s combination of timbral finesse and fleet instincts has made her thego-to special ops for disparate creative musical forces in her adopted hometown, from the AACM to Oprah’s favorite rapper Common to the Joan of Arc cabal. Reid’s reputation is so indelibly linked to the Windy City avant-garde that she was first-call to provide the score for last year’s Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists documentary on the post-war cult “lowbrow” art collective. On her long-awaited debut as band leader, Reid’s compositions function as elegant matrices for her cohorts to untangle and then further complicate into new ornate forms. Ben Ratliff lauds Reid as “a maker of music that’s serious and spiny but also humanistic, songlike, down-to-earth.”

Reid’s quartet is comprised of indispensable post-recession avant-jazz figures: guitarist Mary Halvorson, whose prickly panoramic glitches of Whammy and Webern have made her ubiquitous presence in the New York improvised community since the early oughts; drummer Tomas Fujiwara, a collaborator of Braxton, Ho Bynum, and Matana Roberts who “works with rhythm as a pliable substance, solid but ever shifting” (Nate Chinen, NY Times); and Chicago bassist Jason Roebke, whose approach Peter Margasak of the Chicago Reader favorably compared to “a carefully orchestrated rummage through a hardware store.”

Friday, January 15, 2016 – 8:00pm
NELS CLINE / LARRY OCHS / GERALD CLEAVER TIO
wit Nels Cline, el. guitar; Larry Ochs, saxophone; and Gerald Cleaver, drums

NICK MAZZARELLA TRIO
with Nick Mazzarella, alto saxophone; Anton Hatwich, bass; and Frank Rosaly, drums

Boot & Saddle, 1131 S. Broad Street
$15 General Admission