Bang on a Can

For Immediate Release Updated October 29, 2006

For more information and media requests, contact Allegra McBane at Cantaloupe Music at (718) 852-7755 or allegra@cantaloupemusic.com.

BANG ON A CAN ALL-STARS PLAY AMERICAN UNPOP AT ZANKEL HALL ON DECEMBER 5

“…an elite band of omnivorous performers with the chops to handle the thorniest avant-garde screed but also the power to crank out a withering sonic blitz.” – Vanity Fair

On December 5, 2006, New York’s own electric art-music ensemble, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, play AMERICAN UNPOP at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. The concert features premieres of pieces by Fred Frith of the legendary British avant-rock band Henry Cow, jazz iconoclast Don Byron, and explosive new arrangements of player-piano wizard Conlon Nancarrow, along with works by American transcendentalist Martin Bresnick, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, and Bang on a Can’s own renegade, Julia Wolfe.

One look at the instrumentation of the Bang on a Can All-Stars and you can see their debt to pop music: electric guitar, drum set, sampling keyboard, amplification, and mixed in there is a cello. The raw immediacy of rhythm, the intensity of sound, and the instruments are used by the composers and the All-Stars in inventive, fresh ways-- the jangly guitars of Thurston Moore and Julia Wolfe, the elegant coolness of Fred Frith and Don Byron, the intense concentration of Martin Bresnick and the hyper boogie-woogie of Conlon Nancarrow. AMERICAN UNPOP takes ideas from American pop culture, embraces them, and then takes them off in directions the music has never gone before. As the Bang on a Can All-Star clarinetist and composer Evan Ziporyn says, “the iPod shuffle only changes tracks after every song: you travel light, but the border guards are still on duty. With AMERICAN UNPOP, we’ve torn down the walls.”

Program highlights include three New York premieres: Don Byron’s, “Give Him Some Lub,” written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars and featured on their recent collaborative album with Byron, A Ballad for Many, out on Cantaloupe Music; new arrangements of Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano studies by Evan Ziporyn; and Fred Frith’s “Snakes & Ladders.” Plus, Julia Wolfe’s New York tribute piece, “Big, Beautiful, Dark, and Scary,” Thurston Moore’s “Stroking Piece #1,” and

(over) Martin Bresnick’s, "The Bucket Rider" and "BE JUST!" from The Essential Martin Bresnick out this November on Cantaloupe Music.

The Bang on a Can All-Stars are: Robert Black on bass, David Cossin on percussion, Lisa Moore on piano/keyboards, Mark Stewart on electric guitar, Wendy Sutter on cello, and Evan Ziporyn on clarinets.

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