Saturday, February 9, 2008-7:00 pm
Brooklyn Public Library's Dr. S. Stevan Dweck Center for Contemporary Culture, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NYC, 2/3 to Grand Army Plaza or Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum of Art station or Q to 7th Avenue
Tickets are $10 ($7 for students and seniors) and are available at: http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showCode=DWE2 or by phone at 212-868-4444
From The New York Times, February 26, 2007: "Violinist , violist and composer Leroy Jenkins was one of the pre-eminent musicians of 1970s free jazz, who worked on and around the lines between jazz and classical music.
In 1970 , he formed the Revolutionary Ensemble, a trio with the bassist Sirone and the drummer Jerome Cooper; the group lasted for six years and fused Jenkins's classical technique with a flowing, free-form aesthetic.
In the mid-1970s, after years of cooperative projects, he became a bandleader, and also wrote music for classical ensembles. He led the group Sting, which played a kind of splintered jazz-funk, and made a series of his own records for the Italian label Black Saint. He began to work in more explicitly classical situations, often with old Chicago colleagues like the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. And he wrote music performed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Kronos Quartet and other ensembles.
Mr. Jenkins's trajectory eventually led him toward collaborations with choreographers, writers and video artists. They included The Mother of Three Sons, a collaboration with Bill T. Jones's dance company, staged at New York City Opera in 1991; The Negro Burial Ground, a cantata; Fresh Faust, a jazz-hip-hop opera; and Three Willies, a multimedia opera. In recent years, Mr. Jenkins went back to smaller music-only projects, including the trio Equal Interest, with the pianist Myra Melford and the saxophonist Joseph Jarman; in 2004, he reunited with the Revolutionary Ensemble. "
On February 9, 2008, several prominent musicians will pay tribute to the life and work of Leroy Jenkins:
For over three decades Thomas Buckner has championed music of the avant-garde in America and throughout the world as a performer, producer, and promoter. A former student of the legendary Metropolitan Opera baritone, Martial Singher, he was trained in the classical tradition and has continued throughout his distinguished career to broaden the scope of his vocal styles, specializing in a wide range of experimental music. Buckner has collaborated with a host of "new music" composers including Robert Ashley, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Noah Creshevsky, Annea Lockwood, Bun-Ching Lam, David Wessel, Tom Hamilton, Leroy Jenkins, Phill Niblock, Matthias Kaul and many others. He has made solo appearances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Harvard University, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Edinburgh Festival, the Prague Spring Festival, and the Biennale Festival in Venice, presenting a repertoire that includes more than 100 compositions, written for, or dedicated to him.
Wadada Leo Smith is a trumpet-player, multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser and been active in the creative contemporary world music for over thirty years. His theory of Jazz and World music was significant in his music development as an artist and educator. Smith's early musical life began in the high school concert and marching bands. At the age of thirteen, he became immersed within the Delta Blues and Improvisation music traditions. As an Improvisor-Composer, Smith has studied a variety of music cultures (African, Japanese, Indonesian, European and American) and has developed a Jazz and world music theory, and a notation system to fully express this music which he calls "Ankhrasmation". He has taught at the University of New Haven 1975-'76, the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, NY. 1975-'78, and Bard College 1987-'93. He is currently a professor of Music at the California Institute of the Arts, and is the director of the MFA program in African American Improvisation. He is a member of ASCAP Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
"From her first album in 1991, it was clear that this pianist and composer would stay around," The New York Times said of Myra Melford. Melford has not only stuck around, but she has flourished. She has appeared on more than 20 recordings, including nine as a leader, performed in more than 30 countries, won major awards for composition and piano performance, and worked with some of the world's most innovative musicians. Melford's staying power is the product of ceaseless musical travels; she's always going somewhere. As critic Francis Davis noted , "Myra Melford is the genuine article, the most gifted pianist/composer to emerge from jazz since Anthony Davis." At the keyboard, Melford recasts the blues and boogie-woogie of her Chicago hometown, folds in elements of the music of Eastern Europe and India, and blends them with the rangy, percussive avant-garde stylings she cultivated in studies with Don Pullen and Henry Threadgill. This personal musical vocabulary is further enriched by a lush lyricism and organized by an architectural sense of composition that she derived from classical training.
"One of the most fearless and important new-music ensembles around," (Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle) "who has a brought a new renaissance to quartet music," (Kyle Gann, The Village Voice) the FLUX Quartet has performed to rave reviews at many music centers around the world. FLUX captivates its audiences worldwide with a vivid repertoire balanced between notable pioneers as well as visionaries of tomorrow. From classics by Conlon Nancarrow, Giacinto Scelsi, and Iannis Xenakis, to new works by Leroy Jenkins, Elliott Sharp, Welch and John Zorn, FLUX brings to all of its performances a "boundless, uninhibited energy." ( The New York Times). The FLUX Quartet is comprised of musicians Tom Chiu, Conrad Harris, Max Mandel, and Dave Eggar.
The Brecht Forum is a place for people who are working for fundamental social change and a new culture that puts human needs first. The Brecht Forum offers a year-round program of classes, lectures, seminars, art exhibitions, performance s, popular education workshops and language classes in its new, beautifully renovated home looking out over the Hudson River. The Brecht Forum's Neues Kabarett music series has presented monthly avant-garde / free jazz and experimental music concerts since 1998, creating performing opportunities for established and emerging artists. Neues Kabarett is a volunteer-run collective.
Meet The Composer was founded in 1974 as a project of the New York State Council on the Arts. Meet The Composer has grown to become a national organization, serving composers of every kind of music throughout the United States. Through a range of commissioning, residency, education, and audience interaction programs, Meet The Composer has revolutionized the environment for composers in this country, establishing broadly accepted standards of payment and opening the doors for them to work in cultural institutions of all kinds. Meet The Composer's mission is to increase opportunities for composers by fostering the creation, performance, dissemination, and appreciation of their music.
American Composers Orchestra is the only orchestra in the world dedicated to the creation, performance, preservation and promulgation of music by American composers. Through concerts, recordings, radio broadcasts, educational programs, New Music Readings and commissions, ACO identifies today's brightest emerging composers, champions prominent established composers as well as those lesser-known, and increases awareness of the infinite variety of American orchestral music. ACO also serves as an incubator of ideas, research and talent, as a catalyst for growth and change among orchestras, and as an advocate for American composers and their music. To date, ACO has performed music by 500 American composers, including more than 100 world premieres and newly commissioned works.
The Dr. S. Stevan Dweck Center for Contemporary Culture is the Brooklyn Central Library's state-of-the art auditorium with gallery and meeting spaces. Opened in Fall 2007, the Dweck Center presents the best cultural and educational programming in Brooklyn, from prize-winning authors to musical trendsetters and programs created just for families.
This program is made possible by the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts.
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