Sun

4/25/2010

7:30pm

World

Yeyi

Adam Rudolph and Ralph Jones

• $25 Assigned Rows 1-2
• $15 Assigned Rows 3-5
• $10 General Admission
• $5 Student

• Adam Rudolph, percussion
• Ralph Jones, woodwinds

Event Details

Percussionist Adam Rudolph returns to KCH with Ralph Jones in a concert featuring works from their recent release, Yeyi. On Yeyi, one of two new releases on his own Meta Records label, the master percussionist celebrates his over 30-year partnership with multi-instrumentalist Ralph Jones. Throughout the album’s ten tracks, Jones employs an arsenal of woodwind instruments to complement Rudolph’s percussion battery in a wide-ranging, deeply spiritual dialogue. Rudolph and Jones’ partnership dates back to the 1974 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival. “We understand each other on a creative level and on a philosophical level,” Rudolph says, “which means that we have a profound kind of freedom. Rudolph refers to Jones as “perhaps the greatest woodwind player you may not have heard of,” and the description is apt. Jones’ wide-ranging career has included recordings and performances with the likes of Yusef Lateef, Pharaoh Sanders, & Ahmed Abdul Malik. In addition, he has performed in Rudolph’s ensembles Moving Pictures and with the Go: Organic Orchestra. The intuitive language that the two improvisers have developed over their lengthy collaboration is fully in evidence on Yeyi. Subtitled “A Wordless Psalm of Prototypical Vibrations,” the CD is an offering of thanks, a communion with the natural world both outer and inner. “It’s not trying to evoke nature itself so much as evoking naturalness,” Rudolph says. “The natural state of who we are, the real us as spiritual beings. You can still be in tune with your naturalness living in the 21st century.

“Yeyi” refers to the yodeling of the Mbuti pygmies, one of the oldest indigenous people of the Kongo region of Africa. Their inspiration on the music is twofold, according to Rudolph: one is in the communal harmony with nature towards which the artists strive, and the second is in the legacy of a culture that has rippled outwards over continents and generations, through the African-American musical influences that Rudolph and Jones draw upon. Over the course of the ten explorations that make up Yeyi, Rudolph and Jones draw from a pool of shared knowledge – musical studies, each other’s languages, their own prior interactions – to communicate with a penetrating intensity. Those common elements include a variety of musical traditions, including African and Indonesian music, as well as Indian raga. The duo explores both traditional and original compositions, such as “Oshogbo,” which opens Moving Pictures’ recent CD release “Dream Garden.” Disparate influences can also cross streams, as when Jones conjures the traditional spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" on the ney, a Middle Eastern flute.

Adam Rudolph

Originally from Chicago, composer and handrummer/percussionist Adam Rudolph has, for the past three decades, appeared at festivals and concerts throughout North & South America, Europe, Africa, and Japan. In 1988 Rudolph began his association with the legendary Yusef Lateef, which lasts to this day. He has recorded 14 albums with Dr. Lateef including their large ensemble collaborations: “The World at Peace” (1995), “Beyond the Sky” (2000) and 2003’s “In The Garden” with Rudolph conducting his Go: Organic Orchestra. He has performed worldwide with Dr. Lateef in ensembles ranging from their acclaimed duo concerts to appearing as guest soloist with Koln, Atlanta and Detroit symphony orchestras.

Since the 1970’s, Rudolph has been developing his unique syncretic approach to hand drums in creative collaborations with many masters of cross-cultural and improvised music such as Sam Rivers, Pharaoh Sanders, L. Shankar, and Fred Anderson. He is known especially for his innovative small group and duo collaborations with Don Cherry, Jon Hassel, Wadada Leo Smith, and Omar Sosa.

Since 1992, Rudolph has lead his own performing ensemble, Adam Rudolph’s Moving Pictures, featuring drummer Hamid Drake, Ralph Jones, and Venice-based Butoh dance innovator Oguri. The group has performed in both Europe and the United States, and has released several CDs featuring Rudolph’s compositions. In 1995, he premiered The Dreamer, an Opera based on Friedreich Nietzsche's "Birth of Tragedy.”

Active as a performer in the Los Angeles creative music scene since 1979, Rudolph produces concerts and runs his own label Meta Records. In 1998, he organized the three-day Bootstrap Festival in Los Angeles, presenting over 75 artists from many local and national cultural backgrounds. From 1992–1997 he organized and performed a free weekly concert series of improvised music for children at the Jazz Bakery, which featured guitarist Kevin Eubanks and Ralph Jones. He has received grants and compositional commissions from the Rockefeller Foundation, Meet the Composer, Mary Flagler Cary Trust, the NEA, Arts International, Durfee Foundation and American Composers Forum.