LONG PLAY 2022
April 29-May 1
April 29-May 1
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung is called that because the word can mean “mood” or “tuning,” and the six singers are required to listen intensely to one another as they express words both spiritual and mundane, searching all the while for the perfect balance of tone and tune. Like all great works, it reveals new secrets each time it’s performed; at LONG PLAY, the stellar singers of Ekmeles unlock the door.
Phong Tran is a Brooklyn-based composer, electronic musician, and visual artist. His works are heavily inspired by the sound of early synthesizers, late night wikipedia dives, simulation theory, RPGs, and vaporwave eccojams.
In 1984 the experimental composer Robert Ashley’s masterpiece Perfect Lives premiered as a seven-part television opera. Ashley’s approach to opera was revolutionary – ordinary people whose everyday language hints at the eternal, “sung” in a kind of incantatory murmur, over elemental chords and structures. And here, Baltimore legends M. C. (Martin) Schmidt and Drew Daniel render “The Backyard” from that influential work.
Detroit-based producer duo I-R (Adam Cuthbert & Daniel Rhode of slashsound records) channel electrical modulation through malleable musical forms to construct techno-adjacent grooves and enveloping timbral realms. I-R performs new works for the electronic paradigm as well as a 250bpm speedcore piece for synths by composer Brendon Randall-Myers.
Jeff Tobias Recurring Dream Band is the live expression of an avant-pop solo album squarely in the vein of the mythical Downtown NYC scene where the avant-garde mixes freely with popular music.
Rice falls, like a gentle rain, from the hands of the performers, onto a variety of objects and surfaces. Ricefall is part sonic environment, part visual installation, part intensely quiet and dramatic performance. Performed by the Southern Oregon University Percussion Ensemble, with Terry Longshore, director.
This performance is for Festival VIP ticket holders only. But regular festival pass goers can purchase tickets through BAM!
Renowned German dance company Sasha Waltz & Guests present a dazzling interplay of improvisation and synchronicity inspired by composer Terry Riley’s groundbreaking piece, performed live by the electric Bang on a Can All-Stars.
Brooklyn-based group Infinity Shred create epic stargazing instrumentals combining elements of chiptune, post-rock, and sci-fi soundtracks.
Legendary soul singer Nona Hendryx (Labelle) teams up with original Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas for a wild magical set of songs that spans the entire length and breadth of Captain Beefheart’s groundbreaking catalog, from Safe as Milk through Trout Mask Replica and beyond.
DeForrest Brown, Jr. (Speaker Music) is an Alabama-born, Ex-American self-described rhythmanalyst, writer and representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. He produces digital audio and extended media as Speaker Music.
Innov Gnawa plays the spiritual and hypnotic Gnawa music of Morocco, an ecstatic sound that blends West African Islamic ritual poetry with the deep bass motives from the guembri, delivered by master musician Ma’alem Hassan Ben Jaafer and his colorfully costumed troupe of expert musicians. You will dance, and you might just fly.
Cellist and composer Zoë Keating, with the use of computers and machines, constructs her compositions in front of us, in real time, while we watch. Musical snippets become captured by the technology and added to each other, in layers, transforming simple, straightforward fragments of solo cello lines into giant, orchestral forms.
Dither is a guitar quartet from NYC that covers miles of ground and well into the atmosphere. For this show, they’ll be playing pieces by Aeryn Santillan, inti figgis-vizueta, Amirtha Kidambi and Nate Wooley.
Julia Wolfe’s powerful one-movement works, which combine the violent forward drive of rock music with an aura of minimalist serenity, use the four instruments as a big guitar, whipping psychedelic states of mind into frenzied and ecstatic climaxes.” – The New Yorker. At LONG PLAY, New York’s electric string quartet ETHEL plays Early that summer, Four Marys, and Blue Dress.
Baltimore’s conceptual electronica artists Matmos make beats out of an astonishing array of source materials – cutting hair, the amplified nerve fibers of crustaceans, smashing old LPs. It is a strange kind of alchemy that Matmos can transform all these different and sometimes terrifying sources into cheerful techno beats.
BOMB Magazine and Bang on a Can present a series of artist-driven conversations live at The Center for Fiction. Bringing together artists from different disciplines with unique approaches to artistry, this conversation series centers the artmaking process and invites us to explore new ways of finding common ground. This talk brings together cellist/composer Zoë Keating and bassist/composer Brandon Lopez.
Some are calling this the new golden age of the string quartet – and with the brilliant Attacca it’s easy to see why. For LONG PLAY they’ll be playing a typically wide-ranging repertoire from Philip Glass, Flying Lotus, Caroline Shaw, Anne Müller and Louis Cole.
Brian Eno invented ambient music with his revolutionary 1978 studio album Music for Airports. Made of tape loops and electronic sounds, Eno never intended it to be performed live, but in 1998 the Bang on a Can All-Stars premiered their own live version and they have toured it around the globe ever since. This performance adds the live voices of The Choir of Trinity Wall Street.
BOMB Magazine and Bang on a Can present a series of artist-driven conversations live at The Center for Fiction. Bringing together artists from different disciplines with unique approaches to artistry, this conversation series centers the artmaking process and invites us to explore new ways of finding common ground. This talk brings together musician, composer, researcher and founder of Nawa Recordings Khyam Allami and theorist, journalist, curator, and musician DeForrest Brown, Jr. (Speaker Music).
Kyam Allami’s website
Improvising pianist Kris Davis – free, intense, relentless, volcanic. Bassist/composer Dave Holland has never stopped evolving, reinventing his concept and approach with each new project. Together, they’re fire.
In the Mexican state of Sinaloa, brass bands (bandas) are part of every public celebration. NYC’s Banda de los Muertos brings together incredible players from the jazz scene to play this ebullient party music.
Music by revolutionary French synth goddess Éliane Radigue, including her epic electronic masterpiece L’ile re-sonante in a rare and almost live performance with sonic projections by composer-guitarist Michael Pisaro, and OCCAM X featuring composer-trumpet player Nate Wooley.
Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s music has been described as “holy minimalism” – simple, direct, unornamented, spiritually focused. Kanon Pokajanen – the Canon of Repentance – is his magnum opus, and is performed here by the Choir of Trinity Wall Street.
Craig Harris brings the entire history of the jazz trombone with him wherever he goes—from the growling gutbucket intensity of early New Orleans into the confrontational expressionism of the avant-garde. Craig also re-worked one of the legendary tracks from Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” the culminating performance at LONG PLAY in the BAM Opera House.
Titus Underwood is a force, and Principal Oboe of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra plus the 2021 recipient of the Sphinx Medal of Excellence award. On LONG PLAY, Titus performs works by James Lee III and the in-person premiere of Michael Daugherty’s Six Riffs After Ovid commissioned by Bang on a Can for its online “pandemic solos.”
Sandbox Percussion performs GRAMMY®-nominated ‘Seven Pillars’ by Andy Akiho
Stage Direction and Lighting Design by Michael Joseph McQuilken
Supercellist Ashley Bathgate asked the six composers of the Sleeping Giant collective to write her solo works while channeling the spirit of Bach. Music by Timo Andres, Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Robert Honstein and Andrew Norman.
Rumba de la MUSA is a diasporic collective of artists who gather around the voice of the Caribbean drum. Our community encompasses members from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Chile, Panama, Colombia, and the US. Rumba de la MUSA is a multi-generational group of musicians, composed of long-standing pillars of the NYC Rumba scene as well a young group of rising stars.
Brooklyn-born tubist extraordinaire Marcus Rojas is best known for his work in jazz, playing with the likes of Henry Threadgill, Lester Bowie, and his own trio Spanish Fly but also with with a long list of classical and pop artists including The New York Philharmonic, The Metropolitan Opera, Paul Simon, Sting and more. For Long Play Marcus performs a solo set entitled “Neither from here nor there” with music by Cole Davis, Henry Threadgill, and Marcus Rojas. You will also find him playing with the Bang on a Can Orchestra in Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” the culminating performance at LONG PLAY in the BAM Opera House.
Duo Nicole Mitchell on flute and Fay Victor on vocals make sparks fly. This is a show that provides an opportunity to hear two of the most innovative voices in progressive jazz as they interact in ways both ethereal and rugged. Nicole also re-worked one of the legendary tracks from Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” the culminating performance at LONG PLAY in the BAM Opera House.
Three legends of free improvisation take the stage for a sure-to-be brilliant performance.
Based in both Troy, NY and Nashville, TN, bassoonist Maya Stone is a woodwind wonder woman. A lifelong advocate for new works, she has commissioned and premiered new solo works for bassoon ranging from contemporary, classical, gospel, and the in-between. She will be performing a work by Molly Herron, commissioned by Bang on a Can for its online “pandemic solos,” and works by Adolphus Hailstork, Tonia Ko and David Lang. You will also find her playing with the Bang on a Can Orchestra in Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” the culminating performance at LONG PLAY in the BAM Opera House.
Pamela Z: half composer, half performer, half machine! Pioneering composer-singer Pamela Z will perform a solo set of her own miraculous combination of operatic bel canto and live digital looping. Also, Pamela re-worked one of the legendary tracks from Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” the culminating performance at LONG PLAY in the BAM Opera House.
Steel pans were originally made out of empty oil drums discarded around the Caribbean. Steel pan guru Kendall K. Williams has assembled a massive orchestra of different sized pans, and his hypnotically unpredictable and rhythmically ecstatic tunes push this traditional instrument into the future.
John Luther Adams’ radical vision is to use music to describe how we live in the world, in particular how nature changes us, and how we change it, combining a rugged sense of the elemental with a real concern for the health of the earth. At LONG PLAY, his monumental cycle Strange and Sacred Noise is performed by Left Edge Percussion under the leadership of Terry Longshore.
This performance is for Festival VIP ticket holders only. But regular festival pass goers can purchase tickets through BAM!
Renowned German dance company Sasha Waltz & Guests present a dazzling interplay of improvisation and synchronicity inspired by composer Terry Riley’s groundbreaking piece, performed live by the electric Bang on a Can All-Stars.
The Sun Ra Arkestra, under the longtime leadership of founding saxophonist Marshall Allen, is as vital and cheekily unpredictable as ever. Blending jazz and blues with electronic and extraterrestrial influences, these true pioneers of Afrofuturism carry on the inimitable vision and spirit of their enigmatic founder—composer, pianist, bandleader, poet, and cosmic philosopher Sun Ra.
Vijay Iyer’s elegant, subtle improvisatory style has made him a dynamic crossroads between many musical worlds. His musical language is grounded in the rhythmic traditions of South Asia and West Africa, the African American creative music movement of the 60s and 70s, and the lineage of composer-pianists from Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk to Alice Coltrane and Geri Allen. Here he’s joined with his stellar trio that includes standout players and composers Tyshawn Sorey (drums) and Linda May Han Oh (bass).
Steel pans were originally made out of empty oil drums discarded around the Caribbean. Steel pan guru Kendall K. Williams has assembled a massive orchestra of different voiced pans, and his hypnotically unpredictable and rhythmically ecstatic tunes push this traditional instrument into the future.
“The Eddie Van Halen of the Bagpipes” writes Pop Matters, Matthew Welch has dedicated his life to expanding the repertoire for bagpipes and this concert will include his own works plus solo bagpipe music by pioneering composer Anthony Braxton.
Quo Vadis knows challenging electronic artists, and this sampling of some of their favorites shows why they’re our go-to for “out” techno composers who perform their own stuff. Check out three extraordinary and charimsatic composer/performers at this late night hang and dance. Featuring Russell E.L. Butler, Cienfuegos and Via App.
Michael Gordon builds massive structures out of simple materials. Timber, performed here by Mantra Percussion, is a tour de force of focus and power – six percussionists each play an ordinary wooden 2×4, gradually adding beat upon beat until they swirl into psychedelic clouds of sound.
Pianist Michael Riesman, longtime musical director of the Philip Glass Ensemble, performs a selection of Glass’ solo Piano Etudes and more.
Join Bang on a Can founders and artistic directors Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe as they share the music that inspires them.
This listening party and conversation is for VIP ticket holders.
TAK Ensemble delivers energetic performances “that combine crystalline clarity with the disorienting turbulence of a sonic vortex.” (The Wire) and “impresses with the organicity of their sound, their dynamism and virtuosity” (New Sounds, WQXR). Couldn’t have said it better ourselves!
He’s an All-Star…literally! And his First Fridays with Robert Black have become double-bass must-see TV. Prepare to be gobsmacked.
Under the direction of their founder Dianne Berkun Menaker the Brooklyn Youth Chorus has become one of the most inspiring, ambitious, and polished ensembles in the city. Singing music by Nathalie Joachim, Tania León, Paola Prestini, Olga Bell and Gity Razaz.
Cellist Iva Casian-Lakos is known for both her virtuosity and interdisciplinary versatility from classical cello to boundary-stretching new works, involving choreography, singing, acting, improvisation, and more. Composer Joan La Barbara puts her unique skills to work with ad astra and a trail of indeterminate light for Iva to perform on cello and voice.
Nick Dunston is an acoustic and electroacoustic composer, improviser, and bassist. An “indispensable player on the New York avant-garde” (New York Times), his performances have also spanned a variety of venues and festivals across North America and Europe. He also re-worked one of the legendary tracks from Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” the culminating performance at LONG PLAY in the BAM Opera House.
Composer/performers James Moore & Alicia Hall Moran present an eclectic set of music for soprano and electric resonator guitar. The program will feature their own compositions alongside music by Bryce Dessner, as well as electrified renditions of Ellington ballads and Baroque arias.
Leila Adu is an astonishing force in the space where electropop, avant-classical and singer-songwriter meet. Exploring her roots in New Zealand, Britain and Ghana, Adu is an international artist who has performed at festivals and venues across the world.
Alt-diva Shara Nova sings David Lang’s post-Schubertian song cycle death speaks. Lang combed through every song by Franz Schubert and pulled out just the moments when Death is a character, speaking directly to us, and then set those texts to new music. The result is intimate, haunting, and strangely life-affirming “Schubertgaze” (New York Times). Performed here with Karl Larson (piano), Brandon Randall-Myers (guitar) and Conrad Harris (violin).
Much in-demand New York-based composer and bassist Brandon Lopez fearlessly works at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise and new music.
eddy kwon is a composer, performer, singer, violinist. She is a collaborator with musicians who cross all musical boundaries. Kwon’s songs weave together quirky combinations of delicate word play and fierce fiddling.
Composer/performer Soo Yeon Lyuh brings her musical virtuosity and deep knowledge of traditional Korean music into the 21st century, and beyond, with her unbelievable mastery of the haegum, the Korean 2 string spike fiddle.
The reclusive Soviet-era legend Galina Ustvolskaya wrote six mystical and granitic piano sonatas, spanning 43 years of her life. At LONG PLAY, piano virtuosa Jenny Lin will play the magnificent 5th Sonata, plus a beguiling selection of Etudes and Preludes.
This terrific electronic band started in Puerto Rico but is now based in Brooklyn, mixing hypnotic tropical tunes and dembow beats and glitches and dreampop into their own style of music they call “dreambow.”
Tristan Perich is a composer, an inventor, a technologist and a visual artist, and all of these parts of his persona come together in his music. Expect magic and musical conjuring.
BOMB Magazine and Bang on a Can present a series of artist-driven conversations live at The Center for Fiction. Bringing together artists from different disciplines with unique approaches to artistry, this conversation series centers the artmaking process and invites us to explore new ways of finding common ground. This talk brings together vocalist, composer, and bandleader Amirtha Kidambi and composer/performer and media artist Pamela Z.\
LONG PLAY is thrilled to present an evening with JG Thirlwell + Ensemble. Thirlwell is known for his work as Xordox, Foetus, Steroid Maximus, Manorexia and as the composer for the TV shows Archer and Venture Bros. He has also composed for such ensembles as Kronos Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, String Orchestra of Brooklyn and Dither as well as BOAC. For JG Thirlwell + Ensemble he has rearranged several pieces from the Foetus repertoire with longtime collaborator Simon Hanes (of Tredici Bacci) for the instrumentation of harp, piano, viola, acoustic guitar, bass, and drums.
Composer and musician Kaki King is considered one of the world’s greatest living guitarists, known both for her technical mastery and for her constant quest to push the boundaries of the instrument.
Chicago’s ~Nois Saxophone Quartet squawks, honks and blasts its way through music by members of the international composer collective Kinds of Kings –Maria Kaoutzani, Gemma Peacocke, and Shelley Washington.
On Sunday night, May 1 at 7:30 in the BAM Opera House we present an epic re-imagining of Ornette Coleman’s revolutionary 1959 album, The Shape of Jazz to Come, performed by an all-new Bang on a Can Orchestra of classical and jazz luminaries and Denardo Coleman/Ornette Expressions featuring Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Jason Moran, Lee Odom, Wallace Roney Jr. and special guest James “Blood” Ulmer—conducted by Awadagin Pratt. Commissioned by Bang on a Can and BAM, six trailblazing composers from across the musical spectrum, and curated by Denardo Coleman himself—Nick Dunston, Craig Harris, Nicole Mitchell, Carman Moore, David Sanford, and Pamela Z—come together to arrange, magnify, and honor the six profound pieces on the album that established Coleman as one of America’s most important and visionary musicians.
Note – festival pass holders will reserve their tickets for “Shape of Jazz to Come” by emailing Tim Thomas: tim@bangonacan.org. Tickets will then be issued at the BAM box office prior to the show.
“Right now – this minute – is an amazing time to love music. Musicians and listeners from every corner of the music world are pushing beyond their boundaries, questioning their roots, searching and stretching for the new. There has never been a time when music contained so much innovation and diversity, so much audacity and so much courage. And we want to show you all of it. With the creation of LONG PLAY we are presenting more kinds of musicians, playing more kinds of music, bending more kinds of minds. LONG PLAY expands and enlarges our scope and our reach, and puts more new faces on stages than ever before. It’s a lot of music!”
Michael Gordon, David Lang & Julia Wolfe
LONG PLAY is particularly grateful for the generous lead support from the Howard Gilman Foundation and ASCAP.
Bang on a Can’s 2022 programs are made possible with generous lead support from: Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, Amphion Foundation, ASCAP and ASCAP Foundation, Atlantic Records, Daniel Baldini, Stephen A. Block, Bishop Fund, Jeffrey Calman, Charina Endowment Fund, City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs, Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation, Valerie Dillon and Daniel Lewis, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Jaffe Family Foundation, Alan Kifferstein & Joan Finkelstein, Michael Kushner, Leslie Lassiter, Herb Leventer, MAP Fund, Raulee Marcus, MASS MoCA, Henry S. McNeil, Jr., Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Jeremy Mindich & Amy Smith, Elizabeth Murrell & Gary Haney, National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, New York Community Trust, New York State Council on the Arts (with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature), O’Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation, Justus & Elizabeth Schlichting, Scopia Capital Management, Matthew Sirovich & Meredith Elson, Maria & Robert A. Skirnick, Jane & Dick Stewart, Sandra Tait and Hal Foster, David Tochen & Mary Beth Schiffman, The Family of Cece Wasserman, Williamson Foundation for Music, Adam Wolfensohn & Jennifer Small, and Wolfensohn Family Foundation.
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