Songs for Human Wind:
Susan Rawcliffe (LA), clay flutes
w/ Kevin Corcoran, percussion
+ Cornelius Boots, shakuhachi
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BIOS:
In 2011, a Cultural Exchange International grant from the Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles, enabled Susan Rawcliffe to play, measure & photograph over 300 prehispanic West-Mexican clay flutes from the Crossley-Holland Collection at the University of Wales, Bangor, UK. Past grants include several from the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; a McKnight Visiting Composer's grant from the American Composers Forum; and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Past performances include: on and off Broadway, NYC; the Los Angeles Theater Center; the Museum Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Neon Art, LA; and international festivals such as the Edinburgh Arts Festival, Scotland; Pipeline, Berlin, Germany; AudioArts, Krakow, Poland; and Sound Art, St. John, Canada.
Exhibitions include: the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, CA; Yerba Buena, San Francisco; Clay Studio, Philadelphia, PA; Winter Gardens, NYC; California Craft Museum, SF; the Renwick Gallery, Wash. DC; and P.S. #1, NYC.
Lectures include: the Smithsonian, Washington DC; the Metropolitan Museum, NYC; the Wats:on Festival for Interdisciplinary Artists at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; the Acoustical Societies of America, Mexico & Iberoamerica; the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the International Study Group on Musical Archaeology, Germany.
Published works include both four scholarly musical archaeology articles on my research into prehispanic instruments, as well as many articles on my work as an artist creating & playing ceramic flutes, pipes, ocarinas, whistles, trumpets, didjeridus and sound sculptures.
For more information, visit artawakening.com/soundswork.
Award-winning composer Cornelius Boots is in full-blooded collaboration with the deceptively simple, yet devilishly difficult shakuhachi flute of Zen Buddhism. He is also a specialist in Taimu, its baritone brother. The result is a rich and inspired collision of classic rock, blues, heavy metal, and Zen Buddhist nature hymns from monasteries.
After a 30-year career of high-caliber jazz, classical, rock and experimental music activities, Boots has positioned himself at the crossroads of personal expression and divine revelation. He is the Dio of Bamboo, the Danzig of Zen. You might also think of him as a Pied Piper for the nerdy, strange and enlightened. Take a peek at his music stand and be surprised to discover Western notation next to Japanese kinko notation, and occasionally a blend of the two for his students.
Cornelius is known for his pioneering work with the world’s only bass clarinet quartet, Edmund Welles. Studying shakuhachi since 2001, in 2013 he achieved shihan (master) rank in the dynamic Zen lineage of Watazumido from Michael Chikuzen Gould. Boots received the name Shinzen (深禅 = depth Zen). A graduate of Jacob’s School of Music (B.M. Clarinet Performance, B.S. Audio Recording and M.M. Jazz Studies), Boots has performed and lectured internationally, released over a dozen albums and published scores and instructional materials.
Kevin Corcoran is a percussionist and field recordist with an open interest in sound as medium as it moves through contexts of art, music, ecology, and communication.
As a drummer/percussionist he is most interested in techniques which extend the sonic possibilities of the instrument emphasizing textural sound, atonal sympathetic vibration, sustained tones without audible attack and the use of found objects.
Kevin grew up in Sacramento where he played in a variety of rock and free-jazz groups in addition to solo and collaborative free improvisation and continues these practices in his current city San Francisco.
He holds a degree in Technocultural Studies from the University of California at Davis where he studied sonic arts with Bob Ostertag, Sam Nichols and Kriss Ravetto. He has performed throughout the United States, Europe and in Japan and collaborated on several published recordings since 2002. www.kevincorcoran.net
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Now in our 6th season, the Turquoise Yantra Grotto is a house concert series for avant improvisers and invented instrumentalists with a focus on ethno-modernism and extended techniques. We hold a monthly event which is part concert and part social club, part concert and part art opening, near Twin Peaks in San Francisco. The Turquoise Yantra Grotto is home to many unique invented instruments including the Zen Industrial Gamelan (or grand metalliphone), the Gamelan Piano, and several sonic paintings, as well as instruments by Bart Hopkin, Tom Nunn, David Samas, Dan Gottwald, Peter Whitehead, Bryan Day, Larnie Fox, Susan Rawcliffe and many others. The 4 pianos in the house are each uniquely tuned for a variety of repertoire showcased in our solo piano series.
Cost: $10-15