Tue, 05 April 2005

Euphonic Productions presents:
Tatsuya Nakatani & Audrey Chen duo
Jack Wright & Ben Wright duo

9pm, Tues, April 5
Eyedrum
290 MLK Jr. Drive, Suite 8
404-522-0655
www.eyedrum.org
(jazz/experimental)

Tatsuya Nakatani
Born in Kobe Japan 1970, raised in Osaka. Tatsuya Nakatani has resided in the USA since 1995 and now bases himself in New York where he is recognized as a key player in the improvised music scene. His elements of percussion instruments are: orchestral percussion kit, bowed gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, various sticks and drum set. He stands between the MUSIC categories, genre and cultures, Experimental, Jazz, FreeJazz, Rock, etc. Many voices come from his approach of creation. Besides live performances, he also provides sound, sound design for television, film, and collaborations with dancers and artists.

His recent work in 2003 includes: USA tour with Billy Bang Quintet featuring Frank Lowe, Sabir Mateen Ensemble. Solo tour in Europe and USA, Solo percussion performance at Bronx Museum in New York, Tour in Japan with  Assif Tsahar, performances at NY Butoh Festival, NY Vision Festival and AFUK festival in Copenhagen Denmark.

Recipient of a New York,Bronx Art council individual artist grant.

Also he established music and dance studio “H&H PRODUCTION†in South Bronx from where he dispatches his music creations to the world.

Past Collaborations:
Peter Kowald, Peter Brotzmann, Steve Swell, Roy Campbell, Sabir Mateen, Otomo Yoshihide, Tatsu Aoki,  Xu Feng Xia, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Yasuhiro Yoshigaki, Ken Vandermark, Billy Bang quintet w/Frank Lowe, Assif Tsahar, Cooper-Moore, Jim Baker, Josh Abrams, Miya Masaoka, Le Quan Ninh, , Gunda Gottschalk, Masashi Harada, Mat Maneri, William Parker, nmperign, Tim Barnes, Taylor Ho Bynum, Jane Wang, Michael Zerang, Kyle Bruckman, Taku Unami, Jack Wright, The Psychic Paramount. Dance/movement with Zack Fuller, Anika Kristensen, Claire Barratt, Chris Ferris, Ximena Garnica and etc, Musician, Artist and Filmmakers.

“Discussing all that beauty would take more roses than would fill this space" "focussed and resourceful”
- Stu Vandermark, Cadence

“infallible intuition" and as "a brilliant percussion improvisor- he is capable of a wide range of sounds and qualities, and is always fully present, neither lagging behind nor rushing ahead. His work dances full of thought with an overall easy clarity and earthy groundedness."
- Maria Klein, Boss-Improv

“Nakatani’s sparse punctuation suggests observance of esoteric ritual”
- Julian Cowley, The Wire

“All this hits me like a vibrating temple of metal – a sense of vastness in a small room”
- Eric Zinman, Musician

“Tatsuya is a creator of great sonic spaces-including silences that are overwhelmingly loud, silences that have a granite-like strength and weight"
- Bob Falesch, Musician

Audrey Chen
Audrey Chen has recently exploded onto the new music and performance art scene on the East Coast. Having graduated from the Peabody Conservatory (Baltimore, MD), she previously specialized in early and contemporary music genres, and has performed at festivals, such as Tanglewood, Aspen, and Vancouver Early Music Festival. Now, using her trusty cello, self-styled vocal techniques and ever surprising content/concepts, she has emerged as one of the most vital experimental free-improvisors in the Baltimore community and beyond.

Chen's approach to improvisation and performance is extremely visceral. She utilizes traditional and extreme extended technique in order to create a hybrid language that pushes the boundaries of both instruments. These two combined with an unusually strong sense of movement, sound and space, contribute to the constantly fresh depth of her experimentation.

Chen performs solo and with a wide variety of ensemble incarnations, which include traditional and invented instruments. In addition, many of her performances incorporate both aural and visual components, utilizing sculpture, movement and sound. Her dance collaborations have involved artists such as Cathy Paine, Leah Stein, Maida Withers and Naoko Maeshiba. Among musicians, she has worked with many great improvisers, including Katt Hernandez, Jack Wright, Tatsuya Nakatani, Le Quan Ninh, Peter Jacquemyn, Assif Tsahar, Scott Rosenberg, Michele Doneda, Paolo Angeli, Toshi Makihara and Gianni Gebbia.

Some recent performances include site specific works in collaboration with the Leah Stein Dance Company in Bytom, Poland and with choreographer, Maida Withers in Arkhangelsk and Solovki, Russia. Having just completed a tour in Asia, Chen will be performing in Australia at the Nownow Festival in Sydney and the Melbourne International Festival of Improvised Music. She will also be making her debut in sunny Wellington, New Zealand.

"In little time at all Chen has proven herself an improv powerhouse, with a versatile cello vocabulary and a vocal range that's not even fair: She kicked off this year's High Zero festival all by her own bad self, belting out ululating waves of operatic notes and banshee screech in a cocktail dress."
- Bret McCabe, Baltimore City Paper

Jack Wright has been a bold, even outrageous saxophonist, as well as an influential musical personality over the past twenty years. Continuously on tour, or organizing the next one, he has been called the Johnny Appleseed of free improvisation. As a musical explorer as well, his music passes through radical shifts of style and approach from one year to the next, yet always somehow identifiable as his own. The Washington Post says, "In the rarefied, underground world of experimental free improvisation, saxophonist Jack Wright is king". He plays alto, tenor, and soprano saxes, contra-alto clarinet, and piano, in every possible direction, but rarely what is recognizable. Now, after fifteen years living in Boulder CO, he has returned to his native Pennsylvania and resides in Easton, which enables him once again to become active in the New York and East Coast music scene.

A recent review in a German publication, Bad Alchemy, had this to say of his solo: "Wright does not make music, he embodies it, he transforms it with a naiveté of another order. It grows into a sound river, he is part of the diaphragm through which the heterogeneous whispers."

Jack has over sixty partners around the US and in Europe with whom he plays on his travels and records. His most recent tours in the US have been with Reuben Radding, bassist, Phil Durrant, English laptop musician, French soprano sax player Michel Doneda, trumpet player Tom Djll from Oakland, soprano player Bhob Rainey, and cellist Bob Marsh of the Bay area. In May 2004 he toured across the US with Berlin flutist Sabine Vogel and percussionist Michael Griener.

www.springgardenmusic.com

mp3 of Jack and Ben Wright:
http://www.redroom.org/mp3s/highzero2000/jackwright2.mp3

Ben Wright plays acoustic bass, brass, and saw. He lives in northern New Mexico far from traditional venues for improvised music. The experience of creating music with people drives him frequently to Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and less often to the coasts and the nether regions of the U.S. to perform and to seek concurrent communities of
musicians. He persistently experiments with various forms of music, but is inevitably drawn back to experimental music.

His current projects include a long standing duet with trombonist Kurt Heyl, an anarchist marching brass band, The Rumble trio, Submersible Trio, a Baroque ensemble, periodic tours with his dad, and instantaneous collaborations with odd musicians across the US. A new recording with Kurt Heyl, Gross Motor Music, will be arriving in Spring ’05.

"I believe that experiential free improvisation is the musical form from which all others radiate. I play music for the bliss of that instant when I lose consciousness of my surroundings, my instrument, and myself… there is only music. The attraction to improvising is an attraction to the mutability of the moment. That is the crux where spontaneous creation between performers and audience is conceived.  In improvised music, it is a mystery  what the next moment will bring, so it becomes charged with the excitement of finding out… like life."

From the show:

Tatsuya Nakatani & Audrey Chen

Jack Wright & Ben Wright

Jack Wright

Ben Wright on saw

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