This concert is getting a lot of buzz for a lot of good reasons. Here’s David Bernabo’s preview, and here’s a City Paper interview with Ben Opie.
| October 1, 2010 | ||
| 9:30 pm |
$10/$8 students
Wood Street Galleries is proud to present the world premiere of “Shortplayer,” a new composition by renowned artist and composer Jem Finer. “Shortplayer” will be performed by Finer leading a group of Pittsburgh’s finest musicians at 9:30 p.m. Friday, October 1 at Wood Street Galleries, immediately following the Downtown Gallery Crawl. (“Shortplayer” concert admission is $10/$8 students.) The performance marks the Pittsburgh launch of Finer’s acclaimed artwork Longplayer, a 1,000-year-long composition that has played continuously since 1999, and which arrives in Pittsburgh as part of Wood Street Galleries’ sound-installation show, Audio Space (Oct. 1-Dec. 31, 2010).
The installation of Longplayer at Wood Street Galleries marks another first, as Pittsburgh joins a remarkable list of sites with Longplayer listening posts including the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England, and the Bibliotecha in Alexandria, Egypt. The Wood Street Galleries installation will be the first listening post anywhere between San Francisco and London.
About Longplayer
Created with London-based arts organization Artangel to mark the turn of the millennium, Longplayer is Finer’s response to the difficulty of representing and understanding time on a grander scale. At its core, Longplayer is a mathematically self-generating score—not random, but a set of principles that allow the score to continually create itself in a way that is aesthetically beautiful and musically unique. For 10 years, Longplayer has played through a computer system replicating the sound of Tibetan singing bowls; in 2009, it was performed live for the first time, for 24 hours on real singing bowls. It is not a computer-generated piece: As the hour-long segment “Shortplayer” goes to prove, it can be performed on any instruments, at any stage.
But more importantly, Longplayer is a set of concepts and questions: How to compose in a way immune to changes in the cultural perception of music, changes in technology, and changes in geography and politics? With the listening post and the performance of “Shortplayer,” Finer poses these questions to Pittsburgh’s audiences for the first time.
Jem Finer and the Musicians
Artist and composer Jem Finer is considered a unique voice in exploring issues combining science, technology, and philosophy such as “deep time” through sound installation, autonomous technology, and astronomical sculpture. He has been artist-in-residence at Oxford University’s department of Astrophysics and in 2005 won the PRS Foundation New Music Award for “Score for a Hole in the Ground.” As co-founder and co-writer with famed Irish-punk band The Pogues, Finer has helped create some of the most popular and influential British pop music of the past 25 years.
The musicians gathered to perform “Shortplayer” are some of Pittsburgh’s best-known avant-garde players. Music director David Bernabo has organized the group of horn players including Ben Opie (reeds), Roger Dannenberg (trumpet), Lou Stellute (saxophone), Mark Fromm (reeds), Brandon Masterman (reeds), and Roger Day (tuba).
| July 5, 2010 | ||
| 8:00 pm |
Thunderbird Summer Avant-Jazz Mondays presents Kahil El-Zabar & Hamiet Bluiett Ritual Trio (from Chicago)
with Thoth Trio
The Thunderbird Cafe (21 and up)
Buy Tickets Online, $15 in advance, $20 at the door.
Kahil EL’Zabar is a jazz multi-instrumentalist (mainly a percussionist) and composer. He regularly records for Delmark Records. He joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in the early 1970s, and became its chairman in 1975. He formed the musical groups Ritual Trio and the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, both of which remain active. Musicians with whom Kahil EL’Zabar has collaborated include Dizzy Gillespie, Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Cannonball Adderley, and Paul Simon.
Hamiet Bluiett is an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer. His primary instrument is the baritone saxophone, and he is considered one of the finest living players of this instrument. In the late 1960s, Bluiett co-founded the Black Artists’ Group (BAG) of St. Louis, Missouri, a collective dedicated to fostering creative work in theater, visual arts, dance, poetry, film, and music. Bluiett joined the Charles Mingus Quintet and the Sam Rivers large ensemble. In 1976, he co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet (along with two other Black Artists’ Group members, Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake), which soon became jazz music’s most renowned saxophone quartet. Since the 1990s, he has led a virtuosic quartet, the Bluiett Baritone Nation, made up entirely of baritone saxophones, with drum set accompaniment. In the 1980s, he also founded The Clarinet Family, a group of eight clarinetists playing clarinets of various sizes ranging from E-flat soprano to contrabass. Bluiett has also worked with Babatunde Olatunji, Abdullah Ibrahim, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye. He has recorded for numerous labels including India Navigation, Black Saint, Justin Time, Soul Note, and Knitting Factory.
| March 30, 2010 | ||
| 7:30 pm |
On Tuesday, March 30th, come see CAPA High School’s new music ensemble, Antithesis, perform alongside percussionist/composer Lukas Ligeti and Ben Opie (saxophonist of Opek and Thoth Trio) at Garfield Artworks, 4931 Penn Ave. The concert begins at 7:30 pm and admission is $10, open to all ages. Hope to see you there!
| October 6, 2009 | ||
| 5:00 pm | to | 8:00 pm |
Thoth comprises Ben Opie: reeds; Paul Thompson: bass; David Throckmorton: drums.
As part of The End of Television (http://theendoftelevision.blogspot.com), The Nerve will host a majestic night of jazz and improvised music from the following groups:
HiTEC (Histrionic Thought Experiment Cooperative)
the 22 member experimental orchestra – founded by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
Fred Lonberg-Holm’s Valentine Trio
The Chicago master anti-cellist brings his jazz trio to Pittsburgh to run through original tunes, Fred Katz material, and possibly the odd Sun Ra, Wilco, or Syd Barret tune. Jason Roebke on bass, Frank Rosaly on drums.
Ben Opie’s Sound/Unsound Trio
One of Ben’s newer projects, surely to fall somewhere inbetween the Sun Ra-inspired big band strut of OPEK and the modal jams of Thoth Trio.
at The Nerve: an art and performance venue
500 Dargan Street (at Minerva St. next to the Bloomfield Bridge)
Friday, June 12, 2009
Doors at 7PM, $6
Current HiTEC Lineup:
tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE: piano, electronics, percussion
Tony Balko: camcorder
Ben Opie: reeds, electronics
Kenny Haney: clarinets
Spat Cannon: upright acoustic bass
Dani Simmonds: banjo-uke
Roger Dannenberg: trumpet, flugelhorn, piccolo trumpet, software design
Missi St Pierre: toy piano w/ effects
Julian Krishnamurti: electric bass
Johan Nystrom [auxiliary member in Philly]: extended percussion
Ben Harris: violin
Jonathan Borofsky: monome with mabalhabla software
Mike Tamburo: hammered dulcimer
Unfinished Symphonies: electronic keyboard
Joy: electric guitar w/ nylon strings
William Wedler: Experiment 1
James Gyre: drums
Hyla Willis: erhu
David Bernabo: acoustic guitar
Josh Beyer: cello
Mike Kasunic: digital synth, electronics
Bob Jungkunz: drums
Below are some links to movies of HiTEC:
For Tony Balko’s 16mm footage of HiTEC
(Histrionic Thought Experiment Cooperative) ‘s beginning
of our 21st rehearsal on September 14, 2008EV:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0thj_1lWlA
For the beginning of my documentary of HiTEC’s premier gig:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMpa9VMyWmU
A soft focus high-definition wide-angle shot of a short excerpt
from the 1/9/9 premier of HiTEC at the New Hazlett Theater:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo2apKl_CCY
Fred Lonberg-Holm:
Flyer:
