Sat

10/2/2010

9:00pm

Claudia Quintet performs “Royal Toast” & Brass Blowout – A Party!

Edgefest

• $30 General Admission
• $15 Students (limited availability)

• CLAUDIA QUINTET:
• John Hollenbeck, drums/composer
• Chris Speed, clarinet/tenor saxophone
• Ted Reichman, accordion
• Drew Gress, bass
• Matt Moran, vibraphone
• Matt Mitchell, piano, special guest
• BRASS BLOWOUT:
• Taylor Ho Bynum, cornet
• Ingrid Racine, trumpet
• Nate Wooley, trumpet
• Ed Sarath, flugelhorn
• James Cornish, euphonium
• Dick Griffin, trombone
• Curtis Hasselbring, trombone
• Joe Daley, tuba
• Luther Gray, percussion
• Andrew Drury, percussion

Event Details

This is a true ensemble from top to bottom, a sonic equivalent to a hand-woven tapestry...Impressive.” —DownBeat

Claudia Quintet: This brilliant New York band led by drummer and composer John Hollenbeck — a leader of a new generation of musicians who have brought together many disparate threads of contemporary music to create a new sound — recasts jazz in shimmering new shapes inflected by classical minimalism, new music, progressive rock and post-rock. The Claudia Quintet embraces the textural freedom of electronic sounds and improvisation, the structural ambition of contemporary classical music, and most importantly, the joy of bodacious grooves and unapologetically gorgeous melodies. For this ensemble, Hollenbeck has assembled a group of the foremost innovators in this new sound to create a powerhouse band. The quintet’s one-of-a-kind “jazz and beyond” sound, with massive emotional depth, comes organically from the uncanny interplay of its virtuosos: Drew Gress (John Surman, Uri Caine, Ravi Coltrane), Matt Moran (Slavic Soul Party, Mat Maneri, Theo Bleckmann), Ted Reichman (Anthony Braxton, Marc Ribot, Paul Simon), and Chris Speed (Human Feel, Bloodcount, AlasNoAxis), accompanied by guest pianist Matt Mitchell, best known for his work with Tim Berne. Their beautifully seductive work features propulsive grooves, catchy melodies and improvisation that is nothing short of telepathic.
www.johnhollenbeck.com
www.myspace.com/theclaudiaquintet

This performance is sponsored in part by a grant from Meet the Composer and the MetLife Creative Connections program.

Brass Blowout: Area brass players join the all-star Edgefest artists in this festival closer. The ensemble will play original compositions contributed by several group members.
 

John Hollenbeck

After receiving degrees in percussion and composition from the Eastman School of Music, John Hollenbeck moved to NYC in the early 1990’s. He has worked with many of the world’s leading musicians in jazz (Bob Brookmeyer, Fred Hersch, Tony Malaby, the Village Vanguard Orchestra, Kenny Wheeler), world music (Pablo Ziegler), and new music (Meredith Monk). He has received numerous awards and commissions, which include an NEA grant to study composition with Bob Brookmeyer in 1994 and Meet the Composer grants in 1995 and 2001. He won the Jazz Composers Alliance Composition Contest in 1995 and 2002 and was awarded the 2002 IAJE Gil Evans Fellowship and 2003 IAJE/ASCAP Commission. Hollenbeck was nominated by the Jazz Journalists Association for the following: Up and Coming Jazz Musician of the Year (2004, 2006); Jazz Composer of the Year (2006, 2007); Drummer of the Year and Large Ensemble of the Year (2007). John Hollenbeck was named as both the Rising Star Composer and the Rising Star Arranger of the Year in the 2008 & 2009 Down Beat Magazine’s Critics Poll. Down Beat magazine has in previous years recognized him as a “Rising Star” in the Composer, Jazz Artist, Arranger, Big Band, and Jazz Group (Claudia Quintet) categories. In 2007, John was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Exceptionally creative and versatile, John’s latest CD for his Large Ensemble is “Eternal Interlude” (Sunnyside Records). John has most recently been nominated for two Jazz Journalist Awards, as Arranger of the Year & Composer of the Year, and received the ASCAP Composer Award in June 2010. www.johnhollenbeck.com

Chris Speed

Chris Speed is a saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer. He studied classical piano from the age of five, and began clarinet at eleven. In high school he took up the tenor saxophone and began studying jazz. He later attended the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Speed has lived in New York City since 1992. He leads or co-leads the groups Pachora (with Jim Black, Skúli Sverrisson, and Brad Shepik); Human Feel (with Andrew D’Angelo, Black, and Kurt Rosenwinkel); yeah NO (with Black, Sverrisson, and Cuong Vu); and Trio Iffy (with Ben Perowsky and Jamie Saft). The latter two groups predominantly feature Speed’s compositions. Well-known avant-jazz groups Speed has performed with are Tim Berne’s Bloodcount (with Berne, Jim Black, Michael Formanek, and sometimes Marc Ducret); The Claudia Quintet (with John Hollenbeck, Matt Moran, Ted Reichman and Drew Gress); Jim Black’s Alasnoaxis (with Black, Sverrisson, and Hilmar Jensson); and The Clarinets (with Oscar Noriega and Anthony Burr). Chris Speed performed on the Grammy-nominated album A Blessing, by the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble; and with Pachora contributed the track “Tirzah” to the Masada tribute album Voices in the Wilderness. He has also performed and/or recorded with Myra Melford, Mark Dresser, Susie Ibarra, Erik Friedlander, Satoko Fujii, Hank Roberts, and Dave Douglas. He has appeared on about 70-80 recordings since 1990. In 2006, Speed helped create Skirl Records, an independent record label that is described as “an artist-run collective documenting work by a Brooklyn-centered community of musicians channeling a vast array of ideas and experience into new music.” Speed appeared on two of Skirl’s initial releases (The Clarinets’ self-titled disc and Curtis Hasselbring’s The New Mellow Edwards). www.chrisspeed.com

Ted Reichman

Born in Aroostook County, Maine, in 1973, Ted Reichman performs new music, jazz, rock, traditional Jewish & Balkan music and combinations of the above on accordion and other instruments. Past performances and recordings include work with Anthony Braxton, Uri Caine, Anthony Coleman, Erik Friedlander, Shelly Hirsch, Eyvind Kang, Guy Klucevsek, Alan Licht, Alvin Lucier, Ikue Mori, Marc Ribot, Elliott Sharp and Paul Simon. He is a member of master clarinetist David Krakauer’s ensemble Klezmer Madness. Reichman is also the founder of the New Music Series at Tonic in New York. www.tedreichman.com

Drew Gress

Bassist/composer Drew Gress performs extensively with artists on the cutting edge of contemporary improvised music. His latest project, The Irrational Numbers (Premonition), features Drew’s original compositions for quintet. Earlier releases include the critically acclaimed 7 Black Butterflies (2005), Spin & Drift (2001), and Heyday (1997). Future projects include a new quintet project, a solo bass recording, and an electronics project soon to be unveiled. Drew can also be heard within the ensembles of John Abercrombie, Ralph Alessi, Tim Berne, Don Byron, Uri Caine, Bill Carrothers, Ravi Coltrane, Marc Copland, Mark Feldman, Fred Hersch, John Hollenbeck, Tony Malaby, and John Surman. (In an altogether previous musical life, he grounded the performances of Buddy Hackett, Phyllis Diller, Zoot Sims, Cab Calloway, and Pia Zadora). Drew has toured North and South America, Europe, and Asia, and has served as Artist-in-Residence at St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia and at the Paris Conservatoire. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, and Chamber Music America, and currently resides in New York. Drew is an endorsing artist for Thomastik Strings. www.drewgress.com

Matt Moran

Vibraphonist and tunesmith Matt Moran “plays the vibraphone like a speed-chess master, always darting off into flurries of ingenious, unexpected activity” (Village Voice). He has performed and recorded with artists as diverse as Mat Maneri, Lionel Hampton, Combustible Edison, Ellery Eskelin, and Saban Bajramovic. Moran’s sound is integral to an innovative group of New York musicians who blur the boundaries of composition, improvisation, and folk traditions. Since moving to New York in 1995 he has performed both as leader and sideman, including billings for the Knitting Factory’s What Is Jazz? Festival, the JVC Jazz Festival, the Panasonic Village Jazz Festival, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, and the Vision Festival, as well as leading tours in the U.S. and Europe. TimeOut New York praises Moran and his collaborators for “such unusual breadth and wonderful inconsistency that calling it simply ‘jazz’ paints it into an inaccurate corner. Their performances don’t focus on displays of whirring virtuosity (though that’s certainly a part) or even on the nebulous quality of ‘soul.’ Instead, the musicians attempt to work beyond or outside the patterns to which they would ordinarily gravitate.” Also active as a performer, teacher, and curator in the Balkan folk music scene, Moran plays traditional percussion with artists such as Lefteris Bournias, Raif Hyseni, Demetri Tashie, and other master musicians from the Balkans who have immigrated to New York. With Slavic Soul Party!, he sparked “Balkan Cabaret,” a downtown music series for Balkan and Balkan-inspired music. Moran currently leads the groups Sideshow and Slavic Soul Party! He is also active performing and recording with John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet, the Mat Maneri Quintet, Theo Bleckmann, Dan Levin, Nate Wooley, Kavala Brass Band, and Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band. www.mattmoran.com

Matt Mitchell

Matt Mitchell has pursued an interest in the intersections of both composed and improvised music and of classical, jazz and electronic music, performing consistently throughout the United States and Europe. In addition to his solo activities he has been a member of the long-standing Philadelphia-area groups Kaktus and Feigner, both of which have explored new areas of non-idiomatic group improvisation and released several acclaimed albums on Scrapple Records. His most recent recording, the large-scale electroacoustic piece ‘vapor squint, antique chromatic’, was released on Scrapple in 2007 to uniformly positive reviews. In addition to being a current member of Tim Berne’s Adobe Probe, he has performed with a number of musicians including Ralph Alessi, Ravi Coltrane, Brad Shepik, Shane Endsley, Drew Gress, Mark Helias, Tom Rainey, Jim Black, Ari Hoenig, Josh Roseman, and John Swana, as well as being a former member of the avant-rock band Thinking Plague. He is also a faculty member with the Brooklyn, NY based School for Improvisational Music [SIM]. www.mattmitchell.us