composition
music for dance – aszure barton’s “untouched”
Using music by saxophonist and composer Curtis Macdonald; pianist and musical director Njo Kong Kie; and Russian-born violist Lev “Ljova” Zhurbi, the illustrious choreographer Aszure Barton has collaborated with each dancer independently and built a shared vocabulary for the ensemble based on these personal interactions. Inspired by collaboration, Barton is interested in creating dense environments on stage in which each performer is an individual and all are united by a shared language. Barton’s new work, Untouched, will receive its world premiere at the Harris Theater June 3-6, 2010. Tickets and more information here.
From Time Out Chicago:
“In between the two is Barton’s Untouched, a world premiere. Like Bardo, it’s for twelve dancers and moodily-lit. Otherwise, it’s from the other side of the universe. Its decor (uncredited) is lit (by Nicole Pearce) such that it appears we are looking onto a stage through its back wall. A heavy red curtain hangs, just partly opened, upstage. The floor is lit by shafts of light from beyond this curtain. There’s the sense another house, another audience, is back there sitting quietly, with only a small window onto the action we see clearly, thus, the work is our secret. On top of that atmosphere, Barton builds a world of bodily language suggesting rapidly-shifting power structures lightly dusted with the folkloric. The ambiguity of the work’s title echoes in your head as you watch: They’re immaculate. They’re virgin. They’re alone, above, below. They’ve yet to be experienced. It’s somehow about dancers. It features beautiful ideas about how and when dancers can enter and exit the stage. Its closing duet is spellbinding.”
“I can’t describe it.”
Other reviews:
Chicago Sun Times
Gapers Block Chicago
the bonus track for the 2009 compilation
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Every year, the Banff Centre releases a compilation album of all the best recordings from the International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, fittingly they title it “Centre Pieces”. And yes, that’s centre - the Canadian spelling of “center” :-)
Artistic Director, composer and trumpeter extraordinaire Dave Douglas asked me to create a remix track as an addition to this year’s jazz compilation album. In doing so, I recorded as many sounds as I could from the participants during my time at the workshop. All in all, I sifted through approximately 8 gigs of source material all of which were recorded with nothing more than my pocket-sized field recorder (the Sony PCM-D50 to be exact).
Then the fun began!!
I loaded everything up in a session and played around with all the various individual sound bites. Please note: everything on this track is ‘programmed’ – that is to say these clips were all live, acoustic, and improvised recordings. They were then later re-sliced, effected and synced in an entirely new context quite unique from their original:
Featured on this track is original sound from these musicians:
(in order of appearance)
Adam Miller – Tablas
Michal Vanoucek – ‘Extended’ Piano
Brian Seligman – Acoustic Guitar
Ryan Butler – Electric Guitar
Anu Junnonen – Voice
the joker is released!
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Last year I showed you all an excerpt of a piece I created for recorderist Terri Hron (to see the previous post, click here). Well, I am happy to say that her album “bird on a wire” has just been released throughout Europe, Canada and the U.S., It’s really a great example of several artistic collaborations on many levels. The album’s music is comprised of several composers Terri commissioned for this project, and the audio production is of the highest, warmest quality possible – something that is difficult to achieve when electronics and real-time processing are so widely (or should I say wisely?) utilized. This is a really unique and special album that I am happy to be apart of and encourage you all to seek out.
Terri Hron – Recorder
Dan Porter – Engineering
Yours Truly – Producer/Composer
poetry from the bowery
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Here’s a musical snippet from the last performance at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC. (see this post).
This venue has been home to many colleagues of mine over the years and it was a pleasure to perform its stage!
As many may already know I’ve been busy writing music for several albums and there’s no better way to develop new ideas than to hash it out on live – It was a lot of fun playing with these guys, and I’m eager to keep delving deeper into the sound of this repertoire.
music in the chamber
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Toronto’s Silver Line Trio commissioned me to write a piece for them, it has premiered in Toronto and now Banff, where it became subject to a 5.1 surround sound recording thanks to esteemed producer Steve Bellamy and musical director Barry Schiffman, who made these performances and recordings possible. The piece is called “Table Turned” and is a blend of several musical ideas that were jumping around in my subconscious this past winter. Both the live performance and recording was done in the luscious Rolston Recital Hall.
These musicians really played fantastic, it was really overwhelming to see a project like this come into such ripe fruition. I learned so much. Thank you guys!!!
Edwin Huizinga – Violin
Elspeth Poole – Cello
Rosabel Choi – Piano
