Full Moon Concerts - Cold Moon
Cold Blue artists night - performances of and by the composers and performers of Cold Blue Music!
Program:
The Absence . . . . . Chas Smith
Chas Smith, "extended steel guitar," with the small ensemble of Rick Cox, Marty Walker, Michael Jon Fink, and Read Miller
Objects in the River (of Time) . . . . . Miichael Jon Fink
Adorned with Lightning . . . . . Miichael Jon Fink
Cox and Walker, woodwinds; Fink, electric guitar; Smith, pedal steel guitar; Miller, percussion
Waiting for Anything . . . . . Rick Cox (text by Read Miller)
Cox, prepared electric guitar; Miller, voice; Smith, pedal steel guitar; Walker, clarinet; Fink: electric bass guitar
Last Things . . . . . Jim Fox
Walker, bass clarinet; Cox, electric guitar and samples; Smith, pedal steel guitar; Fink, electric guitar
All works are San Francisco premieres
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Bios of composers/performers
Chas Smith is a Los Angeles-based composer, performer, and instrument designer and builder who, in the spirit of Harry Partch, creates much of his music for his own exotic instruments. His compositions, which always display his dualistic fascination with the scientific and the sensual, might owe their split personalities to the diverse collection of composers he studied with in the 1970s: Morton Subotnick, Mel Powell, James Tenney, and Harold Budd.
As a performer, Smith has appeared on numerous feature film scores, playing both pedal steel guitar and his personally designed instruments. He may be heard on such popular film scores by Thomas Newman as The Shawshank Redemption and American Beauty. (He has also worked for film composers Christopher Young, Charlie Clouser, Mark Mothersbaugh, Jeff Danna, and John Williams.) Smith, who has been featured on recordings by composers Harold Budd and Rick Cox (and with numerous country-western bands), has performed his own works at various new music festivals and art galleries. His music is recorded on seven Cold Blue CDs (five solo recordings and two anthologies discs), and also on the Arc Light, Cantil, MCA, and Straw Dog labels.
Michael Jon Fink’s instrumental and electronic music has been presented at numerous concerts and festivals throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. He has composed concertos for soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, violin, and cello, as well as incidental music for two plays by Wajdi Mouawad: "Forets" (2006) and "Seuls" (2008).
As a composer/improviser with experimental and new music groups, he has toured here and abroad and recorded with The Negative Band, Musica Veneris Nocturnus, Stillife, Ghost Duo, Gods of Rain and Pickaxe. In recent years, he has increasingly focused on performing in solo and small group situations, exploring new sounds and forms on the electric guitar.
The Los Angeles Times has described Fink’s music as "lustrous," "metaphysically tinged" and "unapologetically tranquil" and likened it to the work of the late composer Morton Feldman. The L.A. Weekly has written that Fink’s music is "of ethereal simplicity . . . he has shaped and refined his spare style greatly—it is distinctly his own."
His music is recorded on six Cold Blue CDs (to solo recordings and four anthologies discs), and also on the Centaur, Contagion, C.R.I., Trance Port, Raptoria Caam and WireTapper labels.
Rick Cox is a composer and skilled multi-instrumentalist whom guitarist/composer Ry Cooder called "the hidden master of the crepuscular and the diaphanous." Cox was an early explorer/developer of "prepared electric guitar" techniques His concert pieces, which often employ himself (electric guitar, woodwinds, and/or electronics) in the company of other instrumentalists, have been performed throughout the U.S. The British music publication The Wire wrote pf Cox's often lush and beautiful soundscapes for electric guitar and other instruments: "his enveloping harmonies are less innocent than they first appear. Prettiness with a tough core."
As a performer, he can be heard on recent recordings by jazz/new-music trumpeter Jon Hassell (including Fascinoma and Mariffa Street), with whom he has also toured over the past few years, and on such popular film scores by Thomas Newman as The Shawshank Redemption, The Horse Whisperer, and American Beauty. Cox has also worked with Ry Cooder, arranging, composing and performing on the film scores Last Man Standing and Wim Wenders’ End of Violence. Cox’s own film scores include Inside Monkey Zetterland. A founding member of the improvisation group Tokyo 77 (recorded on the InTone label), he performs with various Los Angeles-based new music, avant-rock, and jazz-oriented ensembles.
His music is recorded on six Cold Blue CDs (to solo recordings and four anthologies discs), and also on the Grenadilla, Advance, and Raptoria Caam labels.
Read Miller is a poet, percussionist/drummer, and composer. After spending many years in the Los Angeles area, where he performed as a drummer in a number of jazz-based ensembles and a number of avant-pop groups, including the Dwindle Family Orchestra, the Improvisors’ Orchestra, Colin Gorman, Snakepit, the Red Poppies, Stillife, and many others, he moved to rural Virginia in the late 1990s. His poems have been published in various poetry periodicals. His musical and text-sound compositions have been recorded on the Advance and Cold Blue labels.
Marty Walker is a clarinetist who specializes in the performance of new music. (He has premiered nearly 100 works written especially for him.) Walker has toured and recorded with various new-music ensembles, including the California E.A.R. Unit, the Robin Cox Ensemble, Some Over History, eXindigo, Viklarbo, and Ghost Duo. As a soloist, he has presented live radio concerts on NPR, Pacifica, and other radio venues and has performed at numerous new music festivals, including New Music America, the International Festival of New Music, and New Music International, and various new music venues, including Real Art Ways, FaultLines, the Monday Evening Concerts, Knitting Factory, Podewil, and Wires.
The Los Angeles Times has called Walker’s playing "masterfully expressive;" El Nacional (Mexico City) has said that his playing "took the audience to another musical dimension;" and Option magazine called him "one of the finest new-music clarinetists in the country." In 2002, Cold Blue released Walker's CD Adams/Cox/Fink/Fox, about which Fanfare magazine wrote, "The performances are about as ego-free as one can find, and they seem indivisible from the compositions themselves." In 2001, Cold Blue released his CD Dancing on Water (Walker on clarinet/bass clarinet, with additional noted new music players William Winant, Amy Knoles, and Wadada Leo Smith, performing works by Lentz, Fink, Garland, Byron, Fox, and Cox), about which 21st-Century Music magazine wrote: "the playing and the recording quality are sparkling."
Walker also appears on Cold Blue CB0001 (Last Things/Fox), CB0004 (I Hear It in the Rain/Fink), and CB0010, The Light That Fills the World/Adams).
Among the labels for which he has recorded are Cold Blue (appearing on eight Cold Blue releases), CRI, O.O.Discs, Tzadik, Grenadilla, Echograph, New World, and Rastacan.
Jim Fox’s music has been commissioned and performed by ensembles and soloists throughout the U.S. and presented at the Monday Evening Concerts, New Music America, Real Art Ways, Wires, the SCREAM Festival, the Ventura Chamber Music Festival, the CalArts Contemporary Music Festival, Podewil (Berlin), the Schindler House/SASSAS, REDCAT, the Ear Inn, L.A.C.E., and many similar venues. He has also scored feature films. His website is www.jimfoxmusic.com.
His music, which has been described by critics as both "austere" and "sensuous" and "suffused with a beautiful sadness," has been recorded on the Cold Blue, CRI, Advance, Grenadilla, Raptoria Caam, and Citadel labels and published in such new music anthologies as Soundings.
The Italian music magazine Blow Up chose Fox’s CD Last Things as a Record of the Year (2000). The Wire called it an "ethereal experience." John Schaefer, producer of WNYC’s New Sounds, described Fox’s The City the Wind Swept Away as "beautiful and evocative." Schaefer wrote that Fox's Descansos, past has a "lush bleakness that evokes the windswept open spaces of the American West," and Frank J. Oteri, editor of the American Music Center's NewMusicBox, wrote of it, "Easily the most beautiful thing I heard all week ... haunting ... deep on so many levels ... you won't want to listen to anything for a while after you've heard this.
Cost: $6 - $10