The Consortium presents two great avantgarde concerts on Penn Avenue!
Wed May 25 8 pm $7 all ages welcome
Garfield Artworks, 4931 Penn Avenue
From Phila/NYC, seen here previously a couple times as member of Peeesseye. on Family Vineyard Records.
improvisational duo
CHRIS FORSYTH & PARANOID CAT
http://www.thechrisforsyth.com/
http://www.myspace.com/cforsyth
with special guests Ben Opie & Matt Wellins
Guitarist Chris Forsyth is known for hypnotic compositions that assimilate minimalism and psychedelia with art rock, folk, and blues influences. He has performed all over Europe and the US, having toured with such like-minded artists as Träd Gräs och Stenar, Steve Gunn, Tetuzi Akiyama, Ignatz, and Es and is a founding member (with Jaime Fennelly and Fritz Welch) of junk folk expressionists Peeesseye, and a member of the elusive experimental group Phantom Limb & Bison. Other notable collaborators include Koen Holtkamp, Meg Baird, Nate Wooley, and choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and RoseAnne Spradlin. Paranoid Cat, Forsyth’s next solo LP, features contributions from members of Peeesseye, Mountains, D. Charles Speer & the Helix, and others, and will be released in March 2011 on Family Vineyard. Drummer Mike Pride, bassist Peter Kerlin, organist Don Bruno, and pianist Hans Chew, aka The Paranoid Cat Band, will be backing Forsyth up on a series of shows following the release. Other recent releases include a contribution to the new Imaginational Anthem 4: New Possibilities compilation LP/CD/DL on Tompkins Square, the Dirty Pool LP (Ultramarine) with organist Shawn Edward Hansen, and Peeesseye’s newest studio LP Pestilence & Joy (Evolving Ear). Forsyth is the caretaker of Evolving Ear and lives in the City of Philadelphia.
“It’s enough to signal Forsyth’s arrival as an erudite and farsighted guitar stylist, mapping a path that’s hip and scholarly in equal measure.” – Daniel Spicer, The Wire Magazine
“A destructible charm teetering on violence and elegance” – Eric Weddle, Signal to Noise Magazine
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Saturday May 28 8 pm all ages welcome $10 adv/$15 door
Modern Formations Gallery, 4919 Penn Avenue, Garfield
Advance tickets at Paul’s CDs, Caliban Books, Dave’s Music Mine, Exchange Sq Hill, Exchange Downtown,
and from the members of Berman/Bernabo/SoySos.
World music-jazz duo on ObliqSound Records
ABLAYE Cissoko (on kora, from Senegal)
& VOELKER GOETZE (on trumpet, from Germany)
http://www.myspace.com/cissokogoetze
with special guests Dave Bernabo / Jeff Berman / Soy Sos (aka Herman Pearl)
This duo has a podcast on WYEP’s website which Rosemary Welsch hosted:
http://podcasts.wyep.org/WORLD113.MP3
The mutual admiration society that is Volker Goetze and Ablaye Cissoko owes itself to a serendipitous meeting that took place in 2001 at the African-European Jazz Orchestra rehearsals in Saint-Louis, Senegal, where they’d been invited to open for Senegalese legend Youssou N’Dour. Despite any cultural barriers that separated them, the German-born trumpeter and the Senegalese kora player and singer discovered they had much in common, both musically and personally. Their commonalities can be heard on Sira, which is an album that reaffirms the maxim that music is the universal language. The album released on October 2008 on ObliqSound. “He comes from the griot tradition. My grandfathers were highly respected spiritual leaders,” says Goetze. “I learn from him and he learns from me. Our music is very much created in the moment, but we understand each other on a much deeper level.”
It was their willingness to absorb new ideas that attracted them to each other. Although Cissoko is wellversed in the traditional music of West Africa, passed along from generation to generation, he has always been a seeker, keeping his ears open for new experiences. Despite his ties to West African traditional music, Cissoko is also a huge fan of jazz, and worked with pianist/composer Randy Weston and others prior to the project with Goetze. “My early influences,” he says, “come from Keith Jarrett, French saxophonist François Jeanneau, Asian and Senegalese music and, of course, Mandingue music, the music of my ancestors.”
His immersion in jazz, and Goetze’s fascination with African music, made them natural candidates for collaboration. “I was fortunate to have experienced some of the greatest innovators of jazz live in concert,” says Goetze, “like Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Wayne Shorter, the Gil Evans Big Band and Joe Henderson. They touched and moved me. That is what I am looking for in music, which is one reason I had to go to Africa. I also am a huge fan of Youssou N’Dour.”
Goetze, who has collaborated with some of the most important figures of the contemporary music scene, including Naná Vasconcelos, Craig Handy and Lenny Pickett, sees similarities between Cissoko’s griot tradition and that of jazz: “[Griot music] is not written; it changes with the epoch and the performance, which is similar to jazz and improvisation.”
“It is our differences that become real strength,” adds Cissoko, who has released two previous solo albums, 2000′s Diam and 2006′s Le Griot Rouge, prior to the duo album Sira. “I adapt myself to the context. I have in myself this ancient tradition of communication. It’s like the branches of a baobab tree, which can touch those of another tree. I’m one of these branches. Volker and I are two musicians of the same generation with different sensibilities, who become one indivisible entity by speaking with our instruments.”
