Thu

9/30/2010

7:00pm

James Ilgenfritz Quintet

Edgefest

• $15 General Admission
• $10 Students (limited availability)

• Nate Wooley, trumpet
• Andrew Bishop, clarinet/saxophone
• Stephen Rush, Fender Rhodes
• Andrew Drury, percussion
• James Ilgenfritz, bass/composition

Event Details

The James Ilgenfritz Quintet blends sonic experimentalism, traditional formal inquiries, rhythmic angularity, and extended improvisational forms into a multifaceted ensemble dynamic.

www.jamesilgenfritz.com
www.myspace.com/jamesilgenfritz

Nate Wooley

Nate Wooley grew up in a Finnish-American fishing village in Oregon. He has spent the rest of his life trying musically to find a way back to the peace and quiet of that time by whole-heartedly embracing the space between complete absorption in sound and relative absence of the same. He began playing trumpet professionally at age 13 with his father, and after studying he moved to Colorado where he studied more with Ron Miles, Art Lande, Fred Hess, and improvisation master Jack Wright. His tenure with Jack began to break Nate out of self-imposed molds and into the sound world that he has embraced as his own. Nate currently resides in Jersey City, NJ and performs solo trumpet improvisations as well as collaborating with such diverse artists as Anthony Braxton, Paul Lytton, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Marilyn Crispell, Joe Morris, Steve Beresford, Wolf Eyes, Akron/Family, David Grubbs, C. Spencer Yeh, Daniel Levin, Stephen Gauci, Harris Eisenstadt, Taylor Ho Bynum and Peter Evans. www.natewooley.com

Andrew Bishop

Andrew Bishop is a composer, improviser, saxophonist, and clarinetist in highly diversified musical idioms. He has received over 20 commissions from professional organizations and universities, numerous residencies, and recognition and awards from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Hewlett-Melon Foundation, and a nomination from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As a performer, Bishop in the words of Nate Chinen of the New York Times is “happily pinballed between the supposed poles of tradition and experimentation.” He has performed with Kenny Burrell, Ray Charles, and The Manhattan Transfer, to name a few.

Stephen Rush

Stephen Rush is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, where he works in an interdisciplinary capacity in five departments with music, dance, art, engineering and other students. He is the director of the Digital Music Ensemble, and the Music Director of the Dance Department. Stephen Rush has been widely commissioned, premiered and performed including the Merce Cunningham Studio and Merkin Hall in New York, Gyory Ballett in Hungary; at universities and colleges in California, Florida, New York, Texas, Wisconsin; and internationally in Canada (Toronto’s Fringe Festival), Costa Rica, Germany, Spain, Hungary, New Zeeland, Norway and Switzerland. Recent performances of Rush’s music (in 1998) have taken place in Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Hungary. Among his concert (non-dance) music eight works have been published (by Dorn, CRC and C. Alan Publications), and has enjoyed performance exposure as far afield as England, France, Ireland, Russia and India. He has recorded his work with the Warsaw National Symphony and members of the New York Philharmonic, and has released CD’s on CALA, CRC Publications, MMC Records, Centraur and the Equilibrium label. Subventions for Rush’s formidable body of work have come from the Michigan Council for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, United States Information Agency, Soros Foundation, Meet the Composer and American Music Center. Rush has lectured at IRCAM in Paris, at the First International Dance Festival in Hungary, at the National University in Costa Rica and the University of Madras in India, among numerous others. He was awarded, with his choreographer/collaborator Sandra Torijano-DeYoung the Mentioné Honorifico from the Government of Costa Rica for innovative work in Modern Dance. He is also known as a jazz pianist, performing with his electronic jazz group “Quartex,” with jazz legend Roscoe Mitchell, and as a co-producer of the radio series, “Uncharted Jazz” on NPR.

Andrew Drury

Andrew Drury (drum set) is drummer/composer, mostly in jazz and free improvisation. He has toured homeless shelters in Indiana, was artist-in-residence for six months with the Oneida Nation, jammed with prison inmates in Connecticut, and led workshops in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Bosnia, and across the U.S. A former student of Ed Blackwell, he can be heard on over 20 CDs and has played with Ricardo Arias, Jim Black, Michel Doneda, Mark Dresser, Peter Evans, Mazen Kerbaj, Eyvind Kang, Briggan Krauss, Myra Melford, Andrea Neumann, Reuben Radding, Wadada Leo Smith, Chris Speed, Steve Swell, TOTEM>, Jack Wright, and others. www.andrewdrury.com

James Ilgenfritz

Bassist and composer James Ilgenfritz approaches the double bass as an archeologist, examining rarified aspects of the instrument's sonic palette to confound the status quo. His work has been praised in Time Out New York, Signal To Noise, All About Jazz – New York, and Downbeat Magazine. Recent performances include work with George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Dick, John Zorn, Gary Lucas, Marilyn Crispell, Denman Maroney, Lukas Ligeti, and Dave Ballou. In 2007 James received a Subito grant from the American Composers Forum for a cross-country tour, performing newly commissioned semi-improvisational notated works for contrabass by composers Jeffrey Treviño, Stephen Rush, and Gordon Beeferman, culminating in a performance at Roulette in New York. Other notable performance venues where James has performed include The World Financial Center, The Stone, Symphony Space, the New Museum in SoHo, and the Knitting Factory Main Stage. Improvisation is central to James’s work, and he has written and lectured on the art of improvisation and its metaphorical relationship to the practical complexity of daily life.