Epistrophy Arts : Adventurous Music - Austin, Texa

Epistrophy Arts presents the debut performance of free music icons Peter Brötzmann and Joe...

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:30:00 -0500

Epistrophy Arts presents the debut performance of free music icons

Peter Brötzmann and Joe McPhee

.Friday, May 31st. 8PM

tickets available online on May 20

Waller Creek School Auditorium (719 E. 41st Austin, 78751)

Epistrophy Arts is proud to present this unique collaboration between two Free Jazz heavyweights, the German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and the American saxophonist and trumpeter Joe McPhee.

Peter Brötzmann “has abundant nonstandard technique, a vocabulary, but what impresses in his playing isn’t the execution so much as the force of presence. He recently turned 70, and he sounds almost invincible,” writes the New York Times. Brötzmann is the most vital European Free Jazz musician of his generation. His 1967 album, Machine Gun, remains the most celebrated document of the early-Free Jazz movement, and ever since, Brötzmann has pushed the boundaries of jazz experimentation. He has worked with Derek Bailey, Han Bennink, Willem Breuker, Andrew Cyrille, Anthony Braxton, and Evan Parker, and has led numerous large ensembles since the 1960s, including the Chicago Tentet. He received the Vision Fest’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, and was the subject of two documentary films released in the same year.

Since his emergence on the creative jazz and new music scene in the late 1960s, Joe McPhee has been a deeply emotional composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a thoughtful conceptualist and theoretician. McPhee’s first recordings as leader were Underground Railroad (1969), Nation Time (1970), and Trinity. He has since worked with Pauline Oliveros, Ken Vandermark, Evan Parker, Mats Gustafsson, Chris Corsano and Peter Brötzmann. His recent releases include a duo recording on Clean Feed with the bassist Ingebright Haker Flaten, and a duo recording with the multi-instrumentalist Eli Keszler.

photo:Peter Gannushkin / DOWNTOWNMUSIC.NET

This project is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Economic Growth & Redevelopment Services Office/Cultural Arts Division believing an investment in the Arts is an investment in Austin’s future. Visit Austin at NowPlayingAustin.com.

upcoming 15th year celebration

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:10:22 -0500

Save the dates. On May 31, Epistrophy Arts will present a special duo performance by Joe McPhee and Peter Brotzmann. and on June 5, we will host a concert by Chicago and Austin’s Dave Rempis Percussion Quartet (Dave Rempis,Tim Daisy, Frank Rosaly and Ingebrigt Haker Flaten)

Epistrophy Arts presents Duo Baars / Henneman

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 21:20:26 -0500

Epistrophy Arts presents

Duo Baars Henneman (from Amsterdam,NL)

Wednesday, October 17 .8PM

Tiny Park Gallery

1101 Navasota Street, Suite 2, Austin, TX 78702 map

admission: $5 to $15 suggested donation.

“There’s a breathless tension and expectation in these musical dialogues, as if neither participant has any idea what is coming next and the music trembles on the edge of revelation,” writes Signal To Noise about the music of Duo Baars-Henneman. This duo with the Dutch improvisers Ab Baars and Ig Henneman began in 1999 at the Festival ControIndicazioni in Rome; they have since toured internationally and conducted numerous educational workshops.

Ab Baars and Ig Henneman are among the leading lights of the Netherlands’ jazz and new music community. Baars has previously performed in Austin with the ICP Orchestra and with his own trio; this will be Henneman’s Epistrophy Arts debut. Their duo program is entitled “Autumn Songs,” which Baars describes as “compositions and improvisations inspired by poems on autumn in all its different meanings.”

A highly distinctive voice from the fertile Dutch jazz scene, Ab Baars (b. Magrette, Netherlands, 1955) combines idiosyncratic creativity with technical skill and a knowledge of his music’s roots. Though his music has been described as “joyously obstinate,” it has an undeniable and colorful catchy-ness that stems from it stripped essence. As an instrumentalist, Baars has been influenced by American jazz greats like Roscoe Mitchell and John Carter, both of whom he has worked with. As a composer, improvisor and band-leader, Baars displays all of the musical characteristics that have come to define the Dutch creative music scene: open forms, varied instrumental strategies, a wacky use of juxtaposition, and an unwillingness to treat jazz—or any music—as a fixed art form. Baars is a mainstay of the ICP Orchestra, the defining group for Dutch jazz, and leads his own longstanding trio with bassist Wilbert de Joode and drummer Martin van Duynhoven.Over the years, Baars has also worked with Ken Vandermark, Roswell Rudd, Sonic Youth, and The Ex.

Over the course of a fifty-year career, Ig Henneman (b. Haarlem, 1945) has explored a wide spectrum of musical idioms, including rock, pop, and symphonic music, and has composed for an equally broad range of performance situations, including for string quartets, films, and puppeteers. She has studied the music of Russian composers Galina Ustvolskaya and Sofia Gubaidulina, unifying the opposing forces of the formal’s structural severity and the latter’s improvisational freedom. The result is an open-minded music with a meticulous attention to detail, with no wasted notes and an emphasis on pulse, timbre, and dynamics.

Links

Ig Henneman

Ab Baars

Epistrophy Arts is supported in part by individual contributions and by The City of Austin under the auspices of the Arts Commission.

Epistrophy Arts presents Peter Brotzmann/Jason Adasiewiecz Duo

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 21:18:49 -0500

Epistrophy Arts is proud to present the international, inter-generational Jazz duo of Peter Brötzmann and Jason Adasiewicz on Friday September 21, 11PM at the 29th St. Ballroom in Austin, Texas.

Friday September 21 11:00 PM (doors 10:30)

29th Street Ballroom

2908 Fruth St. map

16 advance tickets available at

Brown Paper Tickets

Peter Brötzmann - reeds
Jason Adasiewicz - vibraphone

NYT review of duo’s NYC performance

He has been changing people’s minds about music for almost half a century. For those seeking a performance that stirs their passion while also challenging their perspective, German free jazz artist and Austin favorite Peter Brötzmann returns to town with a new exciting project. With 16 complete solo albums and numerous collaborative recordings and concert tours worldwide for over 40 years, Brötzmann has been described as “a towering presence in European free music since the 1960s”

Nate Chinen of the NY Times chose the Duo’s only North American performance so far as one of his ten best concerts in any genre of 2011. “Brötzmann has abundant nonstandard technique, but what impresses in his playing isn’t the execution so much as the force of presence,” writes Chinen. “He recently turned 70, and he sounds almost invincible.” The saxophonist is joined by the “deft, dynamic young vibraphonist”, Jason Adasiewicz.

For Peter Brötzmann, 40-plus years of playing improvised music has produced - even just on recorded evidence - a list of associates that include just about all the major figures in creative music: Derek Bailey, Cecil Taylor, Han Bennink, Rashied Ali, Evan Parker, Misha Mengelberg, Anthony Braxton, Marilyn Crispell and Andrew Cyrille. Always characterized as an energy player - and the power-rock setting of Last Exit with Ronald Shannon Jackson, Sonny Sharock and Bill Laswell, did little to disperse this conviction - his sound is one of the most distinctive, life-affirming and joyous in all music.
“The huge, screaming sound he makes is among the most exhilarating things in the music,” says Brian Morton, “and while he has often been typecast as a kind of sonic terrorist, that does insufficient justice to his mastery of the entire reed family.”
Born in Remscheid, Germany on 6 March 1941, Brötzmann’s early interest was in painting and he attended the art academy in Wuppertal. Soon thereafter, his main occupation became music (though he continues to create visual art.) Self-taught on clarinets, he soon moved to saxophones and began playing swing and bebop. Associations with bassist Peter Kowald, Don Cherry, Alex von Schlippenbach and Steve Lacy during the 1960s brought a new freedom to Brötzmann’s approach. He continues to tour and record widely with Die Like a Dog (Hamid Drake, William Parker and Toshinori Kondo), the Chicago Tentet, and a variety of duo projects.

Jason Adasiewicz (pronounced “Ad-a-SHEVE-its) is a vibraphonist, drummer, and composer, and an integral member of Chicago’s jazz and improvised music scene. His aggressive yet lyrical style can be heard in over 10 working Chicago groups, including those led by Rob Mazurek, Nicole Mitchell, Mike Reed, Josh Berman, and Ken Vandermark. Adasiewicz won the 2011 Downbeat Annual Critic’s Poll in the Rising Star Vibes category, and for the last two years has been nominated by the Jazz Journalists Association as a finalist for ‘Mallet Instrumentalist of the Year’. His quintet Rolldown, and his trio Sun Rooms have each release two recordings. Sun Rooms received top jazz releases of 2010 honors in the New York Times, The Village Voice, The Chicago Tribune, Dusted Magazine and The Chicago Reader.

“Jason Adasiewicz’s vibes shimmer in the ether,” writes trumpeter Rob Mazurek, “A true original with a deep sensibility for sound vibration that can be heard through his innate and idiosyncratic approach to harmony and melody. Jason’s musical history is spiked with fervent free improvisation and tight melodic rendering.”

“A more accommodating rapport emerged in the second set, featuring Mr. Brötzmann with the versatile young vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz. Beginning in anxious clangor — alto saxophone blare, wood mallets jack-hammered sideways along the metal bars — their duologue gradually softened and ripened, occasionally flirting with outright beauty. Mr. Adasiewicz was the agent of that flirtation, but his approach was hardly typical. At one point he created a glowing drone from the vibraphone with two violin bows, clutching them like ski poles. Mr. Brötzmann responded with a stretch of unusually songlike playing, one long tone after another, before resuming his eruptive norm.”

“Brötzmann, the guest of honor at this year’s Vision Festival, played in three separate ensembles, each breathtaking on its own terms. My favorite was this unexpectedly accommodating duo with Adasiewicz, a vibraphonist of exacting tonal effect. A genuine conversation, it covered the full dynamic spectrum, from expectaint hush to meteor-hits-the-building.” -Nate Chinen New York Times

this project is supported through individual contributions, and by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division.

Epistrophy Arts presents Peter Brotzmann / Jason Adasiewicz duo Sept. 21. 2012

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 15:26:00 -0500

in Austin, Texas

Save the date. Stay tuned for details.

Epistrophy Arts presents John Butcher, Thomas Lehn, Gino Robair Trio

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:32:00 -0500

Epistrophy Arts presents

John Butcher, Thomas Lehn, Gino Robair Trio

Friday, Jun 1. 2012 9PM

Carousel Lounge

110 E. 52nd St. Austin, Texas map

$13 advance tickets available at Brown Paper Tickets

$16 at the door

questions. email epistrophyarts at gmail dot com

“In the hands of London improvisor John Butcher, the saxophone can sound like anything, from a peice of hollowed out brass baubled with pads and valves to a hermetically sealed feedback system, a minature sound enviroment teeming with ever-evolving note forms, or a huge echo chamber inflicting dub scale damage on every breath.” - Wire

“Robair is an enormously talented percussionist, with a thorough-going musicality and an instinct for the unexpected.” - The Penguin Guide to Jazz

“Thomas L**n’s ancient analogue synthesizer is an honestly electronic sound source, but he plays it with pianistic animation, a responsive improviser in an ever-shifting, fluid and powerful music.” Stuart Broomer, Coda Magazine

John Butcher

Winner of the 2011 Paul Hamlyn Foundation award for his work as a composer, John Butcher has arguably achieved more than any other contemporary saxophonist in redefining the limitations of the instrument and extending the contexts in which it can find relevance. Through free improvisation, open composition, multi-tracked studio experiments, use of feedback and site specific performances that exploit the acoustic idiosyncrasies of unique environments he has broadened the range of the instrument into previously unheard territories of timbre, polyphony and resonance. Over the last thirty years he has played with AMM, Derek Bailey, Polwechsel, Fred Frith, John Stevens, The Ex, Christian Marclay and hundred more;http://www.johnbutcher.org.uk/

Gino Robair (Bay Area, CA)
Improviser, percussionist and composer Gino Robair has performed and recorded with many of the most consistently adventurous musicians working today, including Tom Waits, John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith and Terry Riley. His opera, I, Norton, has been performed throughout North American and Europe; he has composed for the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, gamelan, MTV, Comedy Central and the CBS animated series The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat; and he is one of the ‘twenty five innovative percussionists’ included in the book Percussion Profiles (SoundWorld, 2001).
http://www.ginorobair.com/

Thomas Lehn (Koln, Germany)

He studied recording engineering and piano at the Music Academy of Detmold, classical piano at the Music Academy of Cologne, and jazz piano with Frank Wunsch and Francis Coppieters. In the 1980s he took part on courses of Studio for pianistic interpretation held by Prof. Jürgen Uhde. Since that time he has been active as a performer of both contemporary music and classical piano repertoire.

For the past twenty years, his major and widely known work has been performing and producing live-electronic music. Rooted in the experience of a wide spectrum of musical fields and based on his background as a pianist, he has developed an individual ‘language’ of electronic music.

The electronic equipment he uses consists of analogue synthesizers from the late 1960s, particularly the EMS Synthi A. The specific character of this modular instrument allows him to spontaneously act and react in close contact with the various structural degrees of the musical process. Lehn has recorded with Marcus Schmickler, Keith Rowe, Phil Minton, Phil Durrant, Radu Malfatti, Axel Dörner, Cor Fuhler,Gerry Hemingway, Andy Moor of The Ex, and is a member of the electronic orchestra M.I.M.E.O.

Epistrophy Arts is funded in part by individual contributions and the City of Austin under the auspices of the Arts Commission.

Epistrophy Arts presents Tim Berne / Snakeoil

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:13:59 -0600

Epistrophy Arts kicks off its 14th year of presenting world-class, cutting-edge jazz in Austin with a rare appearance by iconic NYC saxophonist and composer Tim Berne and his new ensemble Snakeoil. Snakeoil are touring in support of a new ECM records release out this week. This is the only Texas date for the group and seating is limited. Tickets available now! Please tell a friend.

band page on ECM: http://player.ecmrecords.com/tim-berne-snakeoil/artist

Tim Berne / Snakeoil

Tim Berne, saxophones, composer
Oscar Noriega, woodwinds
Matt Mitchell, piano, keyboards
Ches Smith, drums, percussion

Friday, 2/24 8PM
Cactus Cafe on the campus of UT Austin
In the Texas Union (23rd & Guadalupe)
2247 Guadalupe St. (map) (512) 475-6515

tickets $20 available online at Cactus Cafe

“Based on the recorded evidence, it may very well have been Tim Berne who was the definitive genius of NYC’s downtown 1980s jazz scene,” Time Out

“…one of the most discursive saxophonists since John Coltrane.” – Jazz Journalist’s Association

Snakeoil, Tim Berne’s new touring band, is a potent blend of new voices and new ideas. Oscar Noriega (woodwinds), Matt Mitchell (keyboards) and Ches Smith (percussion) bring fresh sounds and vibrant energy. Berne responds with a stunning book of new pieces balancing compositional rigor with fluid group improvisation. Hypnotic rhythms and long, seductive melodies collide with jagged dissonances and surprising textural shifts. A lush, organic blend of saxophones and clarinets is layered with electronic and acoustic keyboards and an ever-changing tapestry of percussion. Freedom and discipline, consonance and discord, past, present and future- all work together to power this new band from Tim Berne.

This project is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division.

band page on ECM: http://player.ecmrecords.com/tim-berne-snakeoil/artist
reviews http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/feb/02/tim-berne-snakeoil-review?CMP=twt_gu
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=41305&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/tim-berne/Content?oid=3102565
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/theticket/2012/0203/1224311139141.html
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/153809-tim-berne-snakeoil/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/arts/music/a-new-album-from-paul-mccartney.html?_r=1 (below McCartney)
http://somethingelsereviews.com/2012/02/07/tim-berne-snakeoil-2012/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=somethngelse
http://londonjazz.blogspot.com/2012/02/cd-review-tim-berne-snakeoil.html
http://www.criticaljazz.com/2012/02/tim-berne-snakeoil-ecm-2012.html

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/293ca0e0-4b09-11e1-88a3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1lv6JC41E
http://www.jazzwisemagazine.com/reviews-mainmenu-132/12263?task=view

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Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Tim Berne was something of a late bloomer, not taking to the saxophone until his college years. Even still, it wasn’t until he heard avant-garde luminary Julius Hemphill that Berne became firmly convinced of the power in the music. He has since perfected his composer / bandleader skills, collaborated with a laundry-list of greats and been recognized by Time Out New York as an “Essential NYC Jazz Icon”.
Berne was born and raised in upstate New York, where he invested most of his time and energy into sports. He had always enjoyed music (especially Motown and Stax-era soul artists like Gladys Knight, Johnny Taylor and Sam and Dave) but never considered himself an active participant until, on a whim, he purchased an alto saxophone while attending college in Oregon. Before long, he taught himself to play, fell in love with jazz, and relocated to Manhattan to apprentice with Julius Hemphill.
Hemphill proved to be an ideal mentor and imparted Berne with lessons not only on technique and composition, but also on the business side of music, including promotion and recording studio dynamics. All the while, he emphasized the importance of maintaining a spiritual vision and writing one’s own music. As Berne recalls, “it never occurred to me that most people don’t play their own music or aren’t bandleaders. I thought that was just part of it.” And so, from the start, the burgeoning saxophonist was uniquely qualified to do things his way.
Beginning in 1979, he was producing records on his very own Empire label and recruiting collaborators like Olu Dara, Paul Motian and Bill Frisell. After a pair of well-received records on Italy’s Soul Note Records, Columbia signed him and helped to promote a series of worldwide tours. Berne was gaining international acclaim by the day, but still had plenty to learn, especially in terms of teamwork and group dynamics. In retrospect, he considers much of this early material “fanatically arranged”, and through subsequent projects with the likes of Craig Taborn, Ethan Iverson, David King, Nels Cline and Jim Black, Berne has cultivated ensembles with “the necessary looseness” of a genuine group identity.
This quartet is the culmination of that realization. Clarinetist Oscar Noriega shares the frontline, as well as a knack for spontaneous composition. Pianist Matt Mitchell is, in Berne’s estimation, a “master at managing the transitions, balancing the structural elements and the free elements and cueing the events in the scores.” Percussionist Ches Smith expanded his kit to include tympani, congas and gongs, all of which alternately propel and suspend the band’s intense, long-form improvisations. Snakeoil makes this Kuumbwa appearance hot on the heels of a brand new eponymous ECM release. Two years of wood-shedding preceded the recording of Snakeoil at New York’s Avatar Studios early in 2011. The album highlights Berne’s compositional style – original and avant-garde, yet perhaps more accessible on this outing.

Instant Composers Pool (ICP) Orchestra, Austin Texas, 4/7/2011....

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:21:00 -0500

Instant Composers Pool (ICP) Orchestra, Austin Texas, 4/7/2011. www.epistrophyarts.org

Kickstarter - Jazz Appreciation month celebration with the ICP Orchestra in Austin, Texas.

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 09:50:16 -0600

Kickstarter - Jazz Appreciation month celebration with the ICP Orchestra in Austin, Texas.

Free Fall in concert in Austin, Texas. March 12, 8PM. advance...

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:34:55 -0600

Free Fall in concert in Austin, Texas. March 12, 8PM. advance tickets available at Waterloo Records and End of An Ear.

Epistrophy Arts presents Free Fall. March 12 8PM

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:35:06 -0600

Epistrophy Arts presents Free Fall. March 12 8PM

Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten's recent CD

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:37:31 -0500

Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten's recent CD:

really enjoying this sublime duet of Norwegian hymns by recently arrived Austin resident Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten.

Photo

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:21:56 -0500