Past Events

Please mark your calendars for New Music Circle’s 59th Season finale concert…

Saturday, May 26th, 2018
7pm doors / 8pm concert

Off Broadway (map)

Cooper-Moore – self-built instruments, percussion, keyboards
Joshua Abrams – guimbri, upright bass
Hamid Drake – drums, percussion

As a composer, performer, instrument builder/designer, storyteller, teacher, mentor, and organizer, Cooper-Moore has been a major, if somewhat behind-the-scenes, catalyst in the world of creative music for over 40 years. As a child prodigy Cooper-Moore played piano in churches near his birthplace in the Piedmont region of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. His performance roots in the realm of avant jazz music date to the NYC Loft Jazz era in the early/mid-70s. His first fully committed jazz group was formed in 1970 – the collective trio Apogee with David S. Ware and drummer Marc Edwards. Sonny Rollins asked them to open for him at the Village Vanguard in 1973. It was not until the early 90s, when William Parker asked him to join his group In Order To Survive, that Cooper-Moore’s pianistic gifts were again regularly featured in the jazz context.  Cooper-Moore’s creative life continues well-strong and unabated into the present day. He was the Lifetime Achievement Honoree at the 22nd iteration of Vision Festival, NYC 2017.

Joshua Abrams is a composer, bassist, and improviser. His early formative musical experiences include performing in a chamber group conducted by Earle Brown, and busking on the streets of Philadelphia as an original member of The Roots. Since the mid-1990s, Abrams has been a key figure in Chicago’s creative music communities and an international touring musician with artists across genres. In 2010, Abrams formed the project Natural Information Society (NIS), a group that creates long-form psychedelic environments that join the hypnotic qualities of the guimbri, a Gnawan lute, to a wide range of contemporary musics and methodologies including jazz, minimalism, and experimental rock.

Abrams has scored numerous feature films, including The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013), and several projects with award-winning director Steve James: the films Abacus: Small Enough To Jail (2017), Life Itself (2014), The Interrupters (2011); and the documentary series America To Me (2018). Abrams’ collaborations with visual artists include projects and exhibitions with Lisa Alvarado, Theaster Gates, and Simon Starling.

Hamid Drake is an American jazz drummer and percussionist, living in Chicago, but spending a great deal of his time touring worldwide. Drake is widely regarded as one of the great percussionists in jazz and improvised music, with a uniquely poetic approach to drumming; he draws from Afro-Cuban, Indian and African percussion instruments and influences. His musical involvements date back to 1974 when he began working with the AACM and felt impelled to explore earlier forms of drumming. He soon began working with several of the greatest innovators in jazz at the time: Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, and Peter Brötzmann. In live settings he continually takes collaborators to higher rhythmic levels, while at the same time carving out space for his own explorations. For over 30 years he has remained one of the most consistently venturesome and compelling drummers of his time.

Saturday, April 7th, 2018

The Luminary ( 2701 Cherokee St, St. Louis, MO 63118 ) 

C. Spencer Yeh – violin, voice, and electronics for quad-sound
Andrew Lampert – 8mm film, 16mm film, and digital video for site specific installation



C. Spencer Yeh is recognized for his interdisciplinary activities and collaborations as an artist, instrumentalist (on violin, voice, and electronics), as well as his music project Burning Star Core. Much of Yeh’s video work engages with avant-garde composition and performance, variously as studies in form and technique, or as documentation of other artists working within his musical, geographic or social spheres. Born in Taiwan, he currently works out of Brooklyn, NY. Yeh’s sound draws inspiration from the late drone music pioneer Tony Conrad, with whom he has collaborated, and his videos reflect a prevailing fascination with experimental film. He edits both media with equal precision, inviting the audience to bridge any possible gaps between these disciplines. He was a 2015 Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room, and now works as a programmer for Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn NY. His video works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, and he is a contributing editor to BOMB magazine.

Andrew Lampert is at the forefront of a new generation of artists engaging with film, video and performance, revisiting and extending the dialogue around an expanded definition of cinema. Utilizing everything from 8mm film to digital projections, Lampert pursues the synergy between artist, art, and audience in a public space, especially as it pertains to cinema. He brings unscripted and chance elements into cinema’s veneer of control, and often works with found material. Originally from St. Louis, he currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been shown at the 2006 Whitney Biennial; The Getty Museum, and the British Film Institute. In addition to his work as an interdisciplinary artist, he was the Film Archivist at Anthology Film Archives in New York for over a decade, and in 2016 edited a book on Beatnik artist/avant-garde filmmaker, Harry Smith.

Presented in partnership with The Luminary

Thursday, March 22. 2018

Off Broadway
3509 Lemp Ave., 63118

Mats Gustaffson – saxophones
Ingebrit Håker Flaten – upright and electric basses
Paal Nilssen-Love – drums

Listen: https://thingjazz.bandcamp.com/



Swedish/Norwegian trio The Thing was formed to create a long awaited synthesis where garage rock and jazz styles could merge by means of this high energy vehicle. Though the group initially came together in 1999 as a tribute project dedicated to legendary composer/trumpeter Don Cherry, it quickly evolved and found its own identity, performing improvised music, informed by the urgency and simplicity of garage rock. If you line up a list of The Thing’s cover selections (songs by The Stooges, The Cramps, The Sonics, and PJ Harvey) beside their roster of collaborators (experimental-rock-luminaries like Jim O’Rourke, Joe McPhee, Peter Brötzmann, and Neneh Cherry) you can get an idea of where their sensibilities lie.

Boot! (2013) is The Thing’s sixth full-length album, and it is among the group’s finest efforts at pairing broad physicality with heady free jazz technique. The record opens with a high-volume reimagining of India, from John Coltrane’s 1963 album Impressions. Here, spiritual jazz is recast as raw and sludgy stoner rock, producing an album of genuine “fusion music” in the best sense of the word.

Saturday, February 24, 2018

Urb Arts
2600 N 14th St, 63106

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe – modular synthesizer, electronics, voice, and video

Listen / Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW5LkUo5HbY&t=790s



Some artists find their voice and then spend their career perfecting it. There are others, however, who spend an entire lifetime in continual transition, as Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe has done. Beginning with his solo electronic work in the late-nineties, Lowe’s vernacular has continually evolved deeper into a world comprised of spontaneous electronic sound, droning modular synthesizer, and vocal improvisations.

Lowe was a vital part of the thriving Chicago underground for some thirteen years before eventually moving to his current home in Brooklyn, where he entered a new chapter of musical creativity. Enamored with the possibilities of electronics, he began exploring the pliable workings of modular synthesizers: “They’re interchangeable, and have the potential to be ever-transforming,” he enthuses. Upon listening to his recorded works, one encounters Lowe’s intuitive method of using analog modular systems to echo the organic nature of the human voice to produce subliminal, trance-like sounds.

Saturday, January 13, 2018

Pulitzer Arts Foundation
3716 Washington Blvd, 63108

Tickets available here

Claire Chase – flute
Tyshawn Sorey – drums, percussion, glockenspiel, compositions
Cory Smythe – piano & compositions

https://www.iceorg.org/



Three years ago, NMC drew a standing-room-only crowd to the Pulitzer, to see Claire Chase, who The New York Times described as “one of the most electrifying flute players on the planet.” She now returns to St. Louis with multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey and pianist Cory Smythe, core members of the arts collaborative she founded, ICE, which The New Yorker described as “America’s foremost new music ensemble.”

Chase is a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, and through ICE, has premiered more than 800 new music works around the world. Sorey, a composer, percussionist, trombonist, and pianist, has just released his sixth record, Verisimilitude, this August; The New York Times called it “his most captivating album yet,” praising the effortless way it obliterates the line between composition and improvisation. Smythe, who performed on the album, is known for his strong jazz improvisation skills, as well as his work in classical and new music. He can be heard on Hilary Hahn’s Grammy Award-winning In 27 Pieces and at the Mostly Mozart festival in Lincoln Center.

Concert Program 

Tyshawn Sorey: Bertha’s Lair for flute and percussion (2016)
Pauline Oliveros: The Witness (1989)
Tyshawn Sorey: Trio for Harold Budd (2012)
Pauline Oliveros: Earth Ears (1989)
Tyshawn Sorey: Bertha’s Lair 2 for flute, piano, and percussion (2016)

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Presented in partnership with Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Special support for this event has been made possible by the Phoebe Dent Weil Charitable Trust.