MATA Benefit concert

• yuniya edi kwon (eddy kwon), violin & voice
• Roshni Samlal, tabla
• Rebekah Heller, bassoon
• Fay Victor, voice
• Darius Jones, saxophone

Join us for an evening of transcendental performances and support MATA's mission to bring you new sounds, new ideas, and new voices! This special event will honor MATA’s long-time Board President, Jim Rosenfield (2007-2021), and composer Missy Mazzoli (MATA Executive Director 2006-2010), who Jim has commissioned and championed for many years. Let’s celebrate!

COVID-19 Protocols: Proof of vaccination required at the door and masks required in the venue at all times.

About Music at the Anthology (MATA)

Music at the Anthology (MATA) is an incubator for adventurous emerging artists experimenting with composition, multi-media, collaborative performance art, and every imaginable sound in between. We present, support, and commission the music of early-career composers, regardless of their stylistic views or aesthetic inclinations. Founded by Philip Glass, Eleonor Sandresky, and Lisa Bielawa in 1996 as a way to address the lack of presentation opportunities for unaffiliated composers, MATA has since developed into the world’s most sought-after performance opportunity for young and emerging composers.

About yuniya edi kwon (eddy kwon), violin & voice

yuniya edi kwon (b. 1989 – also known as eddy kwon) is a violinist, vocalist, poet, and interdisciplinary performance artist based in Lenapehoking, or New York City. Her practice connects composition, improvisation, movement, and ceremony to explore transformation and transgression, ritual practice as a tool to queer space and lineage, and the use of mythology to connect, obscure, and reveal. As a composer-performer and improviser, she is inspired by Korean folk timbres and inflections, textures and movement from natural environments, and American experimentalism as shaped by the AACM. Her work as a choreographer and movement artist embodies an expressive release and reclamation of colonialism’s spiritual imprints, connecting to both Japanese Butoh and a lineage of queer trans practitioners of Korean shamanic ritual. In addition to an evolving, interdisciplinary solo practice, she performs and collaborates with artists of diverse disciplines, including The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Senga Nengudi, Du Yun, Tomeka Reid, International Contemporary Ensemble, Kenneth Tam, Isabel Crespo Pardo, Moor Mother, and Degenerate Art Ensemble. She has performed alongside Roscoe Mitchell, Mary Halvorson, Nicole Mitchell, Cory Smythe, Henry Threadgill, Susan Alcorn, Carla Kihlstedt, Jessika Kenney, Lesley Mok, Satomi Matsuzaki, and others. In 2023, she founded SUN HAN GUILD, a sound and performance collective with composer-improvisers Laura Cocks, Jessie Cox, DoYeon Kim, and Lester St. Louis. She is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Award in Music/Sound, an Arts Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, a Civitella Ranieri Fellow, a Johnson Fellow at Americans for the Arts, and a United States Artists Ford Fellow.

About Roshni Samlal, tabla

Roshni Samlal is a NY-based tabla player, and a student of both Farukhbad exponent, Pt. Anindo Chatterjee and Shri Surdarshan Singh of the UK. Though rooted in the study of the traditional tabla repertoire, she explores the application of Indian classical percussion to electronic, chamber and multi-disciplinary contexts.

About Rebekah Heller, bassoon

Rebekah Heller is an artist whose work aims to expand the sonic possibilities of her instrument and the field at large. Called "an impressive solo bassoonist" by The New Yorker, she is dedicated to exploration, experimentation, and a robust collaborative practice.

About Fay Victor, voice

Brooklyn, NY (USA) based sound artist/composer Fay Victor hones a unique vision for the vocalist’s role in jazz and improvised music. Victor encompasses a distinctive vocalizing, language and performing approach with the foundation of the jazz vocal idiom, now encompassing an “everything is everything” aesthetic bringing in references that span the globe.

About Darius Jones, saxophone

Over the past decade, Darius Jones has created a recognizable voice as a critically acclaimed saxophonist and composer by embracing individuality and innovation in the tradition of African-American music. “Jones’ concept is proudly his own,” writes Philip Clark in The Wire. “[His music] poses big questions about the relationship between the African-American tradition of spirituals, blues and gospel, and now.” With New York City as his base since 2005, Jones has brought his unique sound to dozens of cities around the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Jones early on established himself as a powerful voice in the jazz community and was nominated in 2013 for Alto Saxophonist of the Year, and for Up & Coming Artist of the Year two years in a row for the Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards. More recently The New York Times named Jones among the Best Live Jazz Performances of 2017 for his Vision Festival performance with Farmers by Nature.

Jones has collaborated with artists including Gerald Cleaver, Oliver Lake, William Parker, Trevor Dunn, Branford Marsalis, Steve Lehman, Sun Ra Arkestra, and many more. Signed to AUM Fidelity records in 2009, Jones has released a string of diverse recordings which comprise his Man’ish Boy Epic, featuring music and images evocative of Black Futurism. Darius’ 2012 release, Book of Mæ’bul (Another Kind of Sunrise) was listed among NPR’s Best Top 10 Jazz Albums of that year.

Jones graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a Bachelors in Jazz Studies in 2003, earning a Master’s Degree in Jazz Performance/Composition from New York University in 2008, where he also taught New Music Improvisation for a year as an adjunct professor. Jones taught saxophone and improvisation at Columbia University in 2017.