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CAMA Event! – Craig Hultgren, cello

Saturday, March 5, 2011, 7:30 pm
The Focal Point, 2720 Sutton Blvd. in downtown Maplewood, just south of Manchester. A large public parking lot is located off Marietta Ave, just east of Sutton.

CAMA artist and cellist Craig Hultgren will present a concert of some of the 20th Century’s most severe musical compositions that are associated with the music courses in contemporary music given in Darmstadt, Germany. The program features music by Maricio Kagel and others related to the Darmstadt school. The program will also present videos from this era of great musical experimentation. Joining Hultgren will be percussionists Stuart Gerber from Atlanta, Rich O’Donnell from St. Louis and cellist Tracy Andreotti from St. Louis.

LaDonna Smith and Davey Williams

Saturday, February 12, 2011, 7:30 pm
The Focal Point
2720 Sutton Blvd.

Violinist and violist LaDonna Smith has been on the international new music scene for well over 20 years. She is an active performer, as well as an educator and native of Birmingham, Alabama. LaDonna has created a style of improvisation on violin and viola that is uniquely her own. Alternating classical and extended techniques, she explores her instrument,
painting scenarios and sound pictures as she plays. She has performed at practically every major improvisation festival and many of the New Music Festivals.

Davey Williams is a highly regarded improvising guitarist who performs solo and in collaborations with LaDonna Smith. Throughout the ‘80’s and ‘90’s he was a member of the experimental group Curlew as well as other bands including Ok, Nurse, and Fuzzy Suns. In addition to frequent collaborative performances, the duo maintains their own recording label, TransMuseq, and also co-edit the improvisor, the international journal of free improvisation.

Bloom Project – Thollem Mcdonas & Rent Romus

Saturday, January 22, 2011, 7:30 pm
Kranzberg Arts Center
501 N. Grand

Bloom Project is a spirited collaboration between pianist Thollem McDonas and saxophonist producer Rent Romus. McDonas has logged thousands of miles touring throughout world performing his unique brand of compositional improvisation with eighteen recordings spanning eight recording labels. Romus has released over twenty three recordings and built a community infrastructure in the San Francisco Bay Area as the owner of Edgetone Records and the Executive Director of Outsound.

Bloom Project features free improvisations as well interpretations of textual and graphical scores. The music is an organic construction and expression that combines disparate and divergent stylistic histories with a sense of refreshing immediacy, intensity, and spontaneous inventiveness.

Download the 2010-2011 New Music Circular (PDF) (Season Brochure)

NMC Showcase – Five Innovative Artists

Saturday, December 4, 2010 7:30 pm
Steinberg Auditorium at Washington University

This concert is an opportunity to experience the creativity of five innovative regional artists as they present individual sets of recent work.

• Eric Hall (electronics and processed instruments) is a composer, improviser, producer, and performer of electronic-based music, as well as an installation artist and DJ.
• Zlatko Ćosić is an experimental filmmaker and video artist.
• Lauri des Marais is a self-taught pianist who has a large body of work that includes solo piano, electronic ambience and avant garde arrangements.
• Baba Mike Nelson – Sound artist and vocalist who works with indigenous instruments, fusing a genre bending meld of Asian, and African music with American sounds.
• Ron Coulter is a percussionist, composer and sound artist who works with self-built instruments, an array of electronic effects and unusual sound sources.

Steinberg Auditorium at Washington University
Forsyth at Skinker
7:30pm

Wadada Leo Smith and The Golden Quartet

Saturday, November 13, 2010, 7:30 pm

 

• Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet, flugelhorn
• Vijay Iyer, piano
• Pheeroan akLaff, drums
• John Lindberg, bass

560 Trinity Building at Washington University

Golden Quartet is an ensemble of master composers / performers, whose experimental practice utilizes the quartet form, which is the purest foundation of musical expression in jazz / creative music and western music culture. As multi-instrumentalists they are concerned with a practice and research that involves an array of complex systemic forms, where the musical languages of compositional / improvisational / ankhrasmation are merged seamlessly in their interactive development in the quartet and are manifested in the performance dimension as a single music language. Golden Quartet’s music is fiery, explosive, and surges with a positive improvised energy force that’s constructed with polycentric melodic / sonic / rhythm units. The ensemble’s textural and structural materials reveal a musical terrain that is creatively rich and architecturally clear in form.
Check out a video of Wadada and the Golden Quartet: