Vision Festival: Celebrating Joëlle Léandre
In person: $65 ($45 student/senior) |
Stream: $15
- Joëlle Léandre, double bass
- Myra Melford, piano
- Nicole Mitchell, flute
- Craig Taborn, piano
- Mat Maneri, viola
- Ingrid Laubrock, saxophone
- Steve Swell, trombone
- Jason Kao Hwang, violin
- Fred Lonberg-Holm, cello
- Joe Morris, guitar
trArts for Art will present a special showcase of improvisor and bassist Joëlle Léandre in celebration of her Lifetime Achievement Award, performing with two of her iconic trios, in a collaboration with iconic poet Fred Moten, and with a special tentet composed of legendary French and American musicians. Léandre's celebration includes artists Nicole Mitchell, Myra Melford, Craig Taborn, Mat Maneri, Ingrid Laubrock, and more.
A progenitor of European improvisation, bassist Joëlle Léandre’s ongoing career is an integral story in 20th- and 21st-century music. While studying in Paris, Léandre encountered "the new thing" from musicians escaping America for fair compensation and proper recognition, including Roscoe Mitchell, Bill Dixon, Alan Silva, and Art Ensemble of Chicago. The caliber of her talent attracted attention from early in her career as Léandre performed with notables including Leornard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Giacinto Scelsi, Merce Cunnigham and John Cage, the latter two composing Ryoanji for Léandre specifically. In the years since Léandre has amassed over 200 recordings including numerous collaborations with fellow improvisors such as Marilyn Crispell, Anthony Braxton, Myra Melford, William Parker, Irène Schweizer, Derek Bailey, and Nicole Mitchell, with over 40 composers dedicating pieces to her. Léandre has also been active organizing distinguished all-women's bands including the European Women's Improvising Group (EWIG); Les Diaboliques; and The Tiger Trio. These trailblazing groups have played a vital role in the growing recognition and acclaim for women’s essential contributions to contemporary improvised music.
About Joëlle Léandre, double bass
About Myra Melford, piano
About Nicole Mitchell, flute
A vital breath within the most urgent movements in jazz from this century, Nicole Mitchell is a flutist, composer, poet and educator whose trajectory gained traction in the fertile Chicago scene of the 90s. The first woman president of the legendary and valuable AACM, she planted the seeds for strong relationships with musicians like Anthony Braxton, Ed Wilkerson Jr, Avreeayl Ra, Maia, and Hamid Drake, allowing her to carve her own vision. Encompassing philosophy, mysticism, radical politics and a strong debt to the sci-fi writings of Octavia E. Butler, Mitchell’s work has been deconstructing and articulating problematics of race, gender, technology, and spiritualism in a communal approach to music that dreams of possible futures, conveying in its ascension the freedom of jazz, funk's eternal groove, gospel, modern composition, instruments from all over the world and a number of legacies of devotional and ecstatic music. Assembling different configurations like her Black Earth Ensemble, Sonic Projections or Ice Crystal as vehicles for speculation on alternative realities beside a number of collaborations – Moor Mother, Hamid Drake, Rob Mazurek, Artifacts or Matthew Shipp—Mitchell's compositions create an honorable and inspiring body of work through records like the expansive astral travelings of Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds (2017) or the piercing restraint of the chamber-like maroon cloud (2018). Nicole Mitchell is a Professor of Music at University of Virginia and is the author of The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful (Green Lantern Press and University of Minnesota Press).
https://www.nicolemitchell.com/About Craig Taborn, piano
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, CRAIG TABORN has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for over twenty-five years. He has experience composing for and performing in a wide variety of situations including jazz, new music, electronic, rock, noise, and avant-garde contexts.
Taborn has played and recorded with many luminaries in the fields of jazz, improvised, new music and electronic music including Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Lester Bowie, Dave Holland, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, and many others.
Taborn is currently occupied creating and performing music for solo piano performance (Shadow Plays), piano trio (Craig Taborn Trio), electronic ensemble (Junk Magic), the Daylight Ghosts Quartet, a piano/drums/electronics duo with Dave King (Heroic Enthusiasts), and a new trio with Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith as well as piano duo collaborations with Vijay Iyer (The Transitory Poems), Kris Davis (Octopus).
Taborn is a 2014 Doris Duke Artist, and a 2022 United States Artist Fellow.
His conceptual work 60 x Sixty is now available worldwide, for free at 60xSixty.com
Craig lives in Brooklyn.
https://craigtaborn.com/About Mat Maneri, viola
About Ingrid Laubrock, saxophone
About Steve Swell, trombone
About Jason Kao Hwang, violin
About Fred Lonberg-Holm, cello
Fred Lonberg-Holm is an American cellist based in Chicago. He moved from New York City to Chicago in 1995. Lonberg-Holm is most identified with playing free improvisation and free jazz. He is also a composer of concert works. As a session musician and arranger, he is credited on rock, pop, and country records.