Saturday, October 17, 2015 8:00 pm Littlefield Concert Hall
JACQUES DEMIERRE–FRED FRITH–URS LEIMGRUBER and DAPPLEGRAY
The trio of Jacques Demierre (piano), Fred Frith (electric guitar), and Urs Leimbruger (saxophone) share an evening of improvised music with Dapplegray (
Nava Dunkelman, percussion; Tara Sreekrishnan, piano; Jeanie-Aprille Tang, electronics).
*****
Unfortunately, for medical reasons Barre Phillips is not able to come to Mills College to play the concert on October 17. We have prepared, with his help and agreement, a video montage of several film clips devoted to him. We would like to present this video to the audience as a first set of about 30 minutes. As a second set, we will be joined by the guitarist Fred Frith to perform trio improvisations.
Thank you for your understanding.
–Urs Leimgruber and Jacques Demierre
*****
Facebook Event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/906044289485733/
For detailed information, please visit the Music Now webpage:
http://musicnow.mills.edu
Free to Mills students, faculty, and staff
$15 general. $10 seniors, non-Mills students, and Mills alums
Tickets may be purchased at the door, or online at:
http://www.boxofficetickets.com (keywords: Mills College)
(Mills Alums may purchase the student tickets at Box Office Tickets.)
*****
Biographies:
DAPPLEGRAY
dap-ple-gray (d p l-gr )
adj. gray with an ill-defined mottling of a darker shade
Tara Sreekrishnan [piano]
Nava Dunkelman [percussion]
Jeanie-Aprille Tang [electroacoustic]
Dapplegray is Tara Sreekrishnan,
Nava Dunkelman, and Jeanie Aprille Tang, an electroacoustic trio based in the Bay Area, focused in structured and free improvisation as well as film scoring. The three met in the Music Improvisation Ensemble at Mills College in 2011, studying under Rachel Condry and Fred Frith. They have collaborated with Pauchi Sasaki, Fred Frith, John Zorn, and William Winant among others. Their work has been featured in a wide variety of settings including independent film, music festivals, and performances across the Bay Area. Dapplegray explores the conversion of polar opposite sounds, unfolding stories, dreams, impressions, and delusions. They focus on the urgency of silence and chaos overcoming one another and create a musical space that shifts between dreaming and waking life.
http://dapplegray3.tumblr.com/
Tara Sreekrishnan is a Bay Area-based pianist whose interests include performance and improvisation. She has studied piano with Belle Bullwinkle, Amonte Parsons, John Syzygy and Debbie Poryes and organ with Dr. Sandra Soderlund. Tara is an active member of the Music Teacher’s Association of California and she performs regularly in numerous venues around the Bay Area. She graduated from Mills College where she won the Flora Boyd Piano Performance Prize.
https://tarasreekrishnan.wordpress.com/
Nava Dunkelman is a Bay Area based percussionist and improviser. Born in Tokyo, Japan and raised in a multi-cultural environment by an American father and Indonesian mother, her musical interests span the globe from Japanese taiko to Indonesian gamelan to American marching band, and from classical to contemporary to the avant-garde. Nava studied percussion under Eugene Novotney at Humboldt State University before attending Mills College, where she studied with William Winant, Fred Frith, Maggi Payne, Zeena Parkins, and David Bernstein. Since graduating with a degree in music performance in 2013, she has performed and collaborated with William Winant, Fred Frith, John Zorn, Ikue Mori, George Lewis and many others. Nava has performed classical and contemporary pieces with the William Winant Percussion Group, inkBoat, The Luna Ensemble, San Francisco Girls Chorus, among others. Nava enjoys discovering her own musical language by exploring experimental approaches to communication, progression and space.
www.navadunkelman.com
Jeanie Aprille Tang is sound and light sculpture artist and electroacoustic composer. Her palette is a moving array of timbres with saturated transitions of stark polarities. With a background in behavioral science and electroacoustic synthesis, her sound is shaped by the notion of cross-modal synesthetic abstraction with the urgency of tension and release through spatial manipulation. Born in Hong Kong, Tang gravitates to rhythms of construction sites, roaming traffic, inaudible conversations, and airplanes. Upon her studies at Mills College in Music Composition with focus in Audio Engineering and Media Technology, studying under Maggi Payne and Fred Frith, Tang has been an active audio engineer, sound designer, composer, and performer. Her instruments and installations explore the relationship between resonance and luminance, utilizing electric circuits, triggered by deliberate pulsating fragments of light through glass. Her work has been presented as artist-in-residence at SoART Millstättersee, Carinthia, Austria in 2013, and Titanik Gallery, Turku, Finland in 2014. She has performed and collaborated with John Zorn, Fred Frith, and Ikue Mori among others at The Stone, as well as at The Wooster Group’s The Performing Garage in New York City.
www.ammaateria.com
Jacques Demierre is a pianist, performer and composer. His musical and sound work develops in various directions: improvised music, contemporary music, sound poetry, and sound installation. His compositions and sound realisations are concerned with the activity of listening and with sound space. On the piano, Jacques Demierre has developed a unique operating style, never ceasing to redraw new sound topographies, making us forget the physical weight of the instrument. He collaborates with many improvising musicians–Okkyung Lee, Thomas Lehn, Martial Solal, Radu Malfatti, Joëlle Léandre, Axel Dörner, Fritz Hauser, Sainkho Namtchylak, Urs Blöchlinger, Irene Schweizer, Hans Koch, Isabelle Duthoit, Brandon Labelle, Jason Kahn, Butch Morris, Carlos Zingaro, Gunter Müller, Jaap Blonk, Barry Guy, Lucas Niggli, Sylvie Courvoisier, Hann Bennink, Rhodri Davis, Martin Schütz, Paul Lovens, Dorothea Schürch, Phil Minton, and others. He regularly plays solo piano concerts, and works with Vincent Barras in the field of performance and language art.
Fred Frith is a songwriter, composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist best known for the reinvention of the electric guitar that began with Guitar Solos in 1974. He learned his craft as both improviser and composer playing in rock bands, notably Henry Cow, and creating music in the recording studio. Much of his compositional output has been commissioned by choreographers and film-makers, but his work has also been performed by Ensemble Modern, Robert Wyatt, Arditti Quartet, Ground Zero, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Concerto Köln, and Rova Sax Quartet, among quite a few others. Fred enthusiastically records and performs all over the place with all kinds of musicians and other co-conspirators. A recipient of the Demetrio Stratos Prize (Milan), the Music on Film/Film on Music Award (Prague), and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Huddersfield in his home county of Yorkshire, Fred teaches improvisation and composition at Mills College in Oakland, California and at the Musik Akademie in Basel, Switzerland. He is also currently acting as visiting faculty at the Universidad Austral in Valdivia, Chile.
“I first heard Barre Philips at the infamous Natural Music concert in Cambridge in 1969, with John Lennon, Yoko Ono, John Stephens, John Tchicai and others. Not long afterwards I picked up Unaccompanied Barre, his first solo LP, recorded in a church the year before. More than any other single event this music made me alive to the possibilities of free improvisation and I immediately aspired to transform the electric guitar in the way he had transformed the double bass. Many years later I had the great pleasure of meeting Barre, and subsequently performing together. His friendship since has been very important to me. He is a true giant in the history of this music and I wish him a speedy recovery. –Fred Frith”
For many years, Urs Leimgruber has worked in the fields of Contemporary Improvisation, Jazz and New Music. For decades he has enriched and expanded the saxophone sound with new playing techniques. In solo concerts and with many different acclaimed groups he has toured in Europe, Canada, the United States and Cuba. Among his many concerts and recordings are those with Joëlle Léandre, Marilyn Crispell, Fritz Hauser, Evan Parker, Fred Frith, Steve Lacy, Dorothea Schürch, Roger Turner, Thomas Lehn, Günter Müller, and many others. Together with Jacques Demierre he leads the group 6ix. In the seventies, he was cofounder of the Electricjazz-Freemusic group OM. His music is to be found on CD on HatArt, Unit, FOR 4 EARS Victo and LEO.
Cost: $15 general, $10 seniors and students