Hamid Drake (born August 3, 1955) is an American jazz drummer widely regarded as one of the best percussionists in jazz and improvised music. Incorporating Afro-Cuban, Indian, and African percussion instruments and influence, in addition to using the standard trap set, Drake has collaborated extensively with top free jazz improvisers. He studied drums extensively, including eastern and Caribbean styles. He frequently plays without sticks, using his hands to develop subtle commanding undertones. His tabla playing is notable for his subtlety and flair. Drake's questing nature and his interest in Caribbean percussion led to a deep involvement with reggae.
Percussionist Hamid Drake and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter in performance at Arts for Art’s second ever Under_Line Salon on January 11, 2014...More
Jeff Schlanger a New York City native, graduate of Music & Art High School and ceramic art student of Maija Grotell at Cranbrook, has created public art projects on three interrelated subjects: Peace, War and Music.
musicWitness® paintings and sculpture have been part of all 22 annual Vision Festivals held each spring in New York City. In 2010-14 projections of performance paintings were integrated with live performances on stage. In 2010, a long scroll of thirty paintings was created live over eight nights of avantjazz concerts while an exhibition of paintings honoring Muhal Richard Abrams, Rashied Ali and Billy Bang was installed just outside the auditorium. musicWitness® was awarded Vision Festival Lifetime Recognition in 2014. musicWitness® was performance painter at InterPlay!Berlin 2006, at the Tampere, Finland Jazz Happening 2000—2003, 2006 & 2012, at Sons d’hiver in Paris 2004, AIMToronto in 2007 and 2010 and resident artist at the Guelph, Canada Jazz Festival 2013 and graphics artist there in 2002 & 2005. musicWitness® exhibitions have also been held at the Academy of the Arts Berlin, Hunterdon NJ Art Museum, Webster University-St. Louis, and at El Bohio, the Improvisors Collective, the Learning Alliance, Abrons Arts Center and the Orensanz Art Center on New York’s Lower East Side. Four exhibitions were integrated into the old Knitting Factory on Houston Street from 1993 to 1995 and three major works installed in the Knitting Factory on Leonard Street in New York. Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco held a solo exhibition along with two live painting-demonstration concerts and a BlueGuitar sculpture with related works were created during a live concert in Sonoma, California Art Center. A musicWitness® print exhibition was held at Philadelphia’s Painted Bride Art Center in 201. Original art from the Sonoluminescence Trio +1 tour was exhibited at Gigspace & cover art for its Live at the Record Centre LP released in Ottawa 2017. A 40 x 30-foot outdoor mural of Bob Stewart’s Tuba solo Steal Away was installed opposite the Public Library in New Rochelle, NY 2008-2014. A comprehensive musicWitness® painting and sculpture installation was presented in New York at the CUE Art Foundation in 2005 with two Witnessed live concerts in the charged space. The second concert, featuring William Parker, Oluyemi Thomas, Joe McPhee and Lisa Sokolov, is now documented on DVD as SPIRITWORLD, premiered in June 2006 in Berlin at the Academy of the Arts and in New York City at Anthology Film Archives. CHILE•NEW YORK•AfghanIRAQ, a film featuring William Parker & Roy Campbell playing in a monumental sculpture installation was screened at the Guelph Jazz Festival in 2013, at the 2014 Vision Festival in New York City and is currently available on DVD. RECORDING COVERS, produced at the request of many leading musicians, include: World Saxophone Quartet -Live in Brooklyn, Billy Bang Sextet -Live at Carlos 1, Muhal Richard Abrams & Roscoe Mitchell-Duets and Solos, Borah Bergman - The Fire Tale & The Stone House, Charles Gayle -Consecration & More Live, William Parker’s 3 Solo CDs -Testimony, Lifting the Sanctions and Live at Somewhere There 2010 and small groups: In Order to Survive, Compassion and, with Kidd Jordan & Alan Silva, Emancipation; also Invisible Wisdom with Kidd Jordan & Oluyemi Thomas and David S. Ware Live in New York. In addition, four covers were made for the late Hall of Fame musician Julius Hemphill: Trio Live, two Sextet recordings, Fat Man & The Hard Blues and Five Chord Stud, and the sound environment for Schlanger’s 42nd street ceramic sculpture installation of 400 Faces, CHILE NEW YORK. An extensive series of performance pictures are integrated into the book of William Parker’s CENTERING Box, 2012 and his WOOD FLUTE SONGS Quartet Box Centerfold, Epic Poet, 2013. The massive William Parker Sessionography book, 2014, features musicWitness® art throughout and in color on its front cover. William Parker’s 2015 Conversations II book, published by RogueArt in Paris includes 28 color reproductions of performance paintings of the musicians interviewed and William Parker’s interview with musicWitness®. A World Percussion Summit picture wraps around the cover of the Improvisation Studies Reader edited by Ajay Heble & Rebecca Caines published by Routledge in 2014. A musicWitness® picture of Cecil Taylor in performance is featured on the cover of JAZZING: New York City’s Unseen Scene and another can be found inside Thomas Greenland’s 2016 University of Illinois Press book.
Excerpt of Roy Campbell, Bill Cole, William Parker, and Michael Wimberly performing for musicWitness Jeff Schlanger’s film CHILE•NEW YORK•AfghanIRAQ MORE...
CHILE•NEW YORK•AfghanIRAQ
Ken Filiano performs throughout the world, playing and recording with leading artists in jazz, spontaneous improvisation, classical, world/ethnic, and interdisciplinary performance, fusing the rich traditions of the double bass with his own seemingly limitless inventiveness. Ken’s solo bass CD, subvenire (NineWinds), received widespread critical praise. For this and numerous other recordings, Ken has been called “a creative virtuoso, a master of technique . . . a paradigm of that type of artist. . . who can play anything in any context and make it work, simply because he puts the music first and leaves peripheral considerations behind.”
Ken composes for his quartet with Michael Attias, Tony Malaby, and Michael T.A. Thomspon; a collective with Attias and Tomas Ulrich; and for his decades-long collaborations with Steve Adams and Vinny Golia. Recent AFA Performances: June 3, 2020 On_Line Salon with Andrea Wolper Julie Ezelle Patton / Nasheet Waits / Ken Filiano / Paul Van Curen | Vision 23
“Patt'n Mouth, like cat and mouse, is a 17th Century English language idiom meaning "constant pursuit, near captures and repeated escapes stemming from a contrived action"...More
Darius Jones has created a recognizable voice as a saxophonist and composer by embracing individuality and innovation in the tradition of African-American music. With NYC as his base, Jones has toured around the United States, Canada and Europe. Jones was one of Jazz Times' Debut Artists of the Year for 2009 and was featured in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, and in 'DownBeat' in 2012. Jones' 2012 release, Book of Mæ'bul (Another Kind of Sunrise) was listed among NPR's Best Top 10 Jazz Albums of that year. Critics have called him "robustly creative" (Nate Chinen, NYT) and "one of NYC's most incisive and passionate saxists" (Time Out).
Recent AFA performance: October 11, 2020 Vision Festival: Healing Soul Website: http://www.dariusjonesmusic.com/ D.D. Jackson Bluiett Tribute Band | AFA Vision Festival 24
Performed and recorded on June 16, 2019 at Arts for Art Vision Festival 24, Roulette, Brooklyn...More
Dave Sewelson was born in Oakland, California, in 1952. There was a half-size violin kept in the closet in case he wanted to be a concert violinist. He played trumpet at the age of nine, moving to baritone horn at the age of eleven, followed by a stint on drums until settling on electric bass at thirteen, adding upright bass to the mix until the switch to saxophone at the age of twenty-one. He has specialized in the baritone saxophone since the early seventies. Sewelson arrived in New York City in the summer of 1977, settled in the East Village becoming a stalwart of the downtown scene, played in many bands of the area including the 25 O’Clock Band, Jemeel Moondoc’s Jus Grew Orchestra, Saheb Sarbib’s Multinational Big Band ,Noise R Us, Mofungo, Freedomland and Fast ‘n Bulbous. He was a founding member of the Microscopic Septet. Lifetime member of William Parker’s Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra. He has played with many wonderful musicians, including, Billly Bang, John Zorn, Peter Kuhn, Alex Cline, Roy Campbell, Sonny Murray, Kidd Jordan, Daniel Carter, Will Connell and Stephanie Stone. Current projects include, Two Sisters Inc., Sewelsonics, the MFAFWQ, Trio Dave, and Orchestra Dave and the Jesse Dulman Quartet. As well as being a guest on radio shows on such stations KPOO, WFMU and WKCR he has been heard on the theme music of shows on NPR. Dave hosts a weekly radio show on Saturdays from 2 til 5pm on WFMU’s Give the Drummer Radio Stream. Every week Dave has a guest musician/poet/artist who joins him in the air for conversation, playing records and spontaneous improvisation live on the radio. Past guests have included, Daniel Carter, William Parker, Steve Swell, Michael Moss, Steve Dalachinksy Lisa Sokolov and a host of other luminaries. Recent AFA Performances: July 8, 2020 On_Line Salon with William Parker, Steve Swell, Marvin Bugalu Smith Website: http://sewelsonics.com/ Aquiles Navarro is a New York-based trumpeter, composer and DJ of Panamanian heritage. He is also the CEO & Founder of River Down Records, a label that focuses on documenting and expanding the creative sounds and minds of Panamá. Aquiles derives his sounds from folkloric music, salsa, reggae and everything that were around. This eclectic music background, based on his upbringing in Panama has led him to collaborate with folkloric musicians, dancers, visual artists, actors, poets and really the world around him. He considers himself an improviser, coalescing his range of influences into a unified sonic vocabulary that can be incorporated across genre and medium. Navarro is a part of the liberation-oriented free jazz collective, Irreversible Entanglements. After their highly acclaimed self-titled debut album on International Anthem, Who Sent You? was released on March 20th 2020, creating a wave amongst the music world giving a voice to the times we are living in. Navarro also has a duo project with Brooklyn-based drummer Tcheser Holmes. The duo, entitled Heritage of the Invisible, merges each member’s music and life background through in real time improvisations. Having collaborated for almost a decade, the way in which they blend their rhythms and harmonies has become telepathic in nature. Heritage of the Invisible has two self-released albums, and a third one on the way. Recent AFA Performances: September 10, 2020 On_Line Salon with Luke Stewart, Devin Brahja Waldman, Tcheser Holmes Website: http://www.aquilesnavarro.com/ Irreversible Entanglements | AFA Vision Festival 23Irreversible Entanglements channels the spirit and subject of free jazz as a return to a central tenet of the sound as it was founded—to be a vehicle for Black liberation...More
Jean Carla Rodea (b in Mexico City) is a research-based interdisciplinary artist and educator currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work involves a variety of disciplines and mediums such as music, sound, poetry, vocal performance and performance art, photography, video, movement, and sculpture. Her artistic practice deals with spaces and instances where problematic socio-political and cultural constructs are rendered visible through multimedia installations and performance.
As a musician, Jean Carla is dedicated to perform and compose a plethora of music/sound in a variety of settings – from solo to large ensembles. She has performed and recorded with William Parker, Darius Jones’ vocal quartet Elizabeth-Caroline Unit, Gerald Cleaver’s Uncle June, Anthony Braxton’s Syntactical Ghost Trance Music Choir, Cecilia Lopez’s Machinic Fantasies, and Talibam!. In addition to this, she leads her own multi-media projects; Buscando a Marina/Looking for Marina, and Azares. Jean Carla has worked with Amirtha Kidambi, Patricia Nicholson, Jo Wood Brown, Rachel Bersen, Anastasia Clarke, Taylor Ho-Bynum, Joe Morris, Stephen Haynes, Matt Mottel, etc. She has performed extensively and shown work at Roulette Intermedium, Carnegie Hall, BRIC, Knockdown Center, Judson Church, Danspace, Center for Performance Research, Panoply Lab, Parallel, Rio ll Gallery, The Clemente, BRAC, WAAM, El Museo de Los Sures, Casul, The Graduate Center, to mention a few. Recent AFA Performances: July 3, 2020 On_Line Salon w/ Ellen Christi, Patricia Nicholson, William Parker Website: http://www.jeancarlarodea.com/ Jean Carla Rodea | AFA Artist Diary
These days have been about time passing to become a pause (to mourn, to imagine, to strategize). As I spend time with memories, meaningful objects, plants, and light, stories weave in song and sound...More
A mainstay of the Chicago jazz scene and an active recent addition to the New York scene, Jaimie Branch is an avant-garde trumpeter known for her “ghostly sounds," says The New York Times, and for "sucker punching" crowds straight from the jump off, says Time Out. Her classical training and “unique voice capable of transforming every ensemble of which she is a part” (Jazz Right Now) has contributed to a wide range of projects not only in jazz but also punk, noise, indie rock, electronic and hip-hop. Branch’s work as a composer and a producer, as well as a sideman for the likes of William Parker, Matana Roberts, TV on the Radio and Spoon, is all on display in her debut record Fly or Die – a dynamic 35-minute ride that dares listeners to open their minds to music that knows no genre, no gender, no limits.
Recent AFA Performances June 24, 2020 On_Line Salon w/ Jason Ajemian Website: https://www.jaimiebranch.com/ Jaimie Branch FLY OR DIE | Vision Festival 23
Jaimie Branch’s FLY or DIE quartet perform compositions from their self-titled debut record. at the 2018 Vision Festival....More
Marshall Belford Allen, alto saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, bandleader, and arranger, was born May 25, 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky and started clarinet lessons at age 10. At 18, he enlisted in the Army's 92nd Infantry (renowned as the Buffalo Soldiers), playing clarinet and alto saxophone in the 17th Division Special Service Band. Stationed in Paris during World War II, he played with pianist Art Simmons and saxophonist Don Byas, and he toured and recorded with James Moody during the late '40's. Upon honorable discharge, Mr. Allen enrolled in the Paris Conservatory of Music, studying clarinet with Delacluse. Returning to the States in 1951, Marshall settled in Chicago, where he led his own bands, playing in clubs and dance halls, while writing his own music and arrangements, as he continues to do today. During the mid-'50's, Marshall met Sun Ra and became a student of his precepts. After joining the Sun Ra Arkestra in 1958, Marshall Allen led Sun Ra's formidable reed section for over 40 years (a role akin to the position of Johnny Hodges in the Duke Ellington orchestra). Marshall Allen lived, rehearsed, toured and recorded with Sun Ra almost exclusively for much of his musical career, leading the reed section during the time that the Sun Ra Arkestra won the "Downbeat" polls as number-one big band in 1988 and 1989. As a featured soloist with the Arkestra, Marshall pioneered the avante-garde jazz movement of the early '60's, expanding a style rooted in Johnny Hodges and Don Byas, and influencing all leading avante-garde saxophonists thereafter. During this time, Marshall also invented a woodwind instrument he called the "morrow," utilizing a saxophone mouthpiece attached to an open-hole wooden body. (This instrument is currently being marketed under another name, as Marshall never secured a patent on his invention). Marshall Allen was one of the first jazz musicians to play traditional African music and what is now called "world music," working frequently with Olatunji and his Drums of Passion. In fact, Marshall is most likely the sole jazz musician who builds and plays the kora (a popular West African multi-stringed instrument), and he has been a major factor in its introduction to American audiences, as well as the world at large. Marshall Allen is featured on over 200 Sun Ra releases, as well as appearing as special guest soloist in concert and on recordings with such diverse groups as NRBQ, Phish, Sonic Youth, Diggable Planets, Terry Adams, and Medeski, Martin & Wood. Perhaps most significantly, Marshall Allen assumed the helm of the Sun Ra Arkestra in 1995 after the ascension of Sun Ra in 1993 and John Gilmore in 1995. Mr. Allen continues to reside at the Sun Ra Residence in Philadelphia, composing, writing and arranging for the Arkestra much like his mentor, totally committed to a life of discipline centered totally on the study, research, and further development of Sun Ra's musical precepts. Marshall maintains the Sun Ra residence as a living museum dedicated to the compilation, restoration and preservation of Sun Ra's music, memorabilia, and artifacts. Marshall has launched the Sun Ra Arkestra into a dimension beyond that of mere "ghost" band by writing fresh arrangements of Sun Ra's music, as well as composing new music for the Arkestra. He works unceasingly to keep the big-band tradition alive, reworking arrangements of the music of Fletcher Henderson and Jimmie Lunceford for the Arkestra to play, along with many other American standards. Marshall Allen is recognized all over the world as the premier avant-garde saxophonist, appearing in solo concert in London in 1995, duet with Terry Adams in 1997 in Canada, and featured in articles in "JazzTimes" (12/02), "Signal to Noise" Magazine, and innumerable other music magazines and radio and TV interviews. He is frequently called upon to give master classes, lectures, and demonstrations of Sun Ra's musical precepts, and he Keeps himself accessible to all who have an interest in Sun Ra's legacy. Website: http://www.sunraarkestra.com Vision Festival 20 | Sun Ra Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen Pt I
Karen Borca was one of the first musicians to make a mark pioneering the bassoon as a front line instrument in Avant-Garde Jazz and Free Jazz.
Borca studied music at the University of Wisconsin with John Barrows and Arthur Weisberg, graduating in 1971. While at the University of Wisconsin, she met Cecil Taylor, who taught at the university during the 1970/1971 academic year. Borca studied with Taylor, played in his big bands, ensembles, and the Cecil Taylor Unit, and was his assistant while he worked in the Black Music Program at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was an assistant to Taylor's longtime collaborator, saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, while he was artist-in-residence at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont in 1974. Borca married Mr Lyons and played with his ensemble until he died in 1986. She has performed with her own bands in the U.S and Europe, including The Berlin Jazz Festival, The Vision Festival,Jazz Happening in Finland, The Taktlos Festival in Switzerland, The Vision Festival in NYC,The Newport Festival Salute to Women in Jazz and many other clubs, Concerts and venues. She was a featured artist in the international women’s orchestra of soloists and composers, Canaille, which performed at the Calouste Gulbenkian Art Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal. She is recorded with her band, CecilTaylor, Jimmy Lyons, Bill Dixon, William Parker, Paul Murphy and others. She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Jyderup Accordeontrat in Denmark in Oct of 2016. More recently on Oct.5, 2019 she performed her compositions/improvisations with her band, the Karen Borca Quartet at Jazz at Atlas in Newburgh, N.Y.. Also on Oct. 24th & 26th 2019, Karen Borca arranged and orchestrated the music of Cecil Taylor for the Karen Borca Big Band. She rehearsed the group and conducted a performance of Mr Taylor’s music with that group for the conference Unit Structures-The Art of Cecil Taylor in New York City. On December 1st, 2020 Borca’s group, including William Parker, Hilliard Greene and Newman Taylor Baker, played a live stream video with Arts for Art celebrating the birthday of Jimmy Lyons. Karen played with Willian Parker and NewmanTaylor Baker at a Riverside Park sculpture on Sept. 12,2021, presented by the Jazz Foundation of America. And, on Oct. 24, 2021, she performed with Hill Greene and Jackson Krall at St Mark’s Church , and later that day at the Catalytic Sound Festival with Fred Lomberg-Holm and Michael Wimberly, at the Fridman Gallary NYC. Website: http://www.karenborca.com/ Whit Dickey Trio w/ Guests Karen Borca & Jackson Krall | AFA Vision Festival 23
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