For years, I have been meaning to attend the Big Ears Festival which is held annually in Knoxville, Tennessee. It is one of the premier music festivals in the United States featuring cutting-edge, thought-provoking, and experimental music. This year was my first time at the festival and I was impressed by the range of music
After time spent visiting the estate of Harriet Tubman in Auburn, New York, Viktor Le Givens and Angel Bat Dawid presented a new work, Suite Harriet, on the main stage of BRIC Jazzfest in Brooklyn on the 21st of October. Le Givens’ work seeks to deepen and broaden our contact with the “etheric realm” through
Tilt Brass managed to fill the Pioneer Works performance space with sound and people in Red Hook on October 12th. Their performance was the 12th in a monthly series called False Harmonics put on by Pioneer Works highlighting new improvisational music. Tilt Brass, an ensemble led by trombonist and composer Chris McIntyre, performed pieces by
At its best, improvised music is in the moment, created out of necessity, reflecting the times in which it was created. I’ve found that there are particularly delectable moments with this music when you are in a room where you feel that the music itself is being born right out of the collective feeling in
The Variousound Sessions series at Pine Box Rock Shop featured an improvised set by saxophonist Ben Cohen, Korg electronicist Eli Wallace, guitarist Drew Wesely, and drummer Kevin Shea. This ensemble pitted three younger artists who have emerged on the Brooklyn scene over the past few years–Cohen, Wallace, and Wesely–pitted with the veteran Shea who has
Poet No Land has surged onto the scene over the past couple of years, performing in duos, trios, or solo, mesmerizing audiences with her precise diction and incisive commentary. Joanna Mattrey has been performing in New York the better part of a decade in a number of contexts, including solo sets, and has worked in
For the opening night of the Never Before Never Again Fest at Triskelion Arts on January 11, the regular duo of dancer Azumi Oe and bassist Sean Ali teamed up with percussionist Carlo Costa for a deep synthesis of sound and movement. Oe is an evocative movement artist who improvises her movements with incredible grace
VAX lit things up at De-construkt on Saturday night. The room was packed and, as always with a VAX performance, there was considerable chatter within the audience before they took the stage about what might occur. VAX events are more than a simple concert, they are an event, one that is a bit more of
America often revels at powerful Black figures being co-opted by the white supremacist-capitalist super-structures of our society in familiar themes we have all heard many times over: X escaped the projects and now makes millions as a star athlete, actor, or performer, which enabled them to leave their old world behind. The underlying message is
As the second set at Spectrum on January 4 (following the trio of Kate Gentile, Brandon Seabrook, and Matt Mitchell that I reviewed yesterday), tenor saxophonist Anna Webber played “five short pieces.” In the course of her set, she demonstrated the many different forms her music can take. The first piece opened with high-pitched repetition
