Efw Presents: John Blum / Michael Foster at St. Andrew's & St. Luke's Episcopal Church

"The most well-informed aficionados of NYC's jazz avant-garde speak of pianist John Blum with reverential respect, yet his discography is shockingly small for someone with a three-decade career: five albums as a leader, four as a sideman. Blum studied piano with seminal avant-gardist Cecil Taylor and ambidextrous master Borah Bergman, and it shows, yet his style at its most intense is more thickly textured than even theirs, and fully individualistic."

— Forced Exposure

"Michael Foster is a saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, curator, and improviser based in New York City dealing with various forms of "weird music". His work seeks to bridge the gaps between noise, improvisation, the jazz tradition, and queer theoretical practices. He often prepares his saxophone with an array of objects such as balloons, drum heads, amplification, etc as a method of queering the instrument's musical roles and history."...

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"The most well-informed aficionados of NYC's jazz avant-garde speak of pianist John Blum with reverential respect, yet his discography is shockingly small for someone with a three-decade career: five albums as a leader, four as a sideman. Blum studied piano with seminal avant-gardist Cecil Taylor and ambidextrous master Borah Bergman, and it shows, yet his style at its most intense is more thickly textured than even theirs, and fully individualistic."

— Forced Exposure

"Michael Foster is a saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, curator, and improviser based in New York City dealing with various forms of "weird music". His work seeks to bridge the gaps between noise, improvisation, the jazz tradition, and queer theoretical practices. He often prepares his saxophone with an array of objects such as balloons, drum heads, amplification, etc as a method of queering the instrument's musical roles and history."

— Pioneer Works

Elysium Furnace Works returns to the chapel of St. Andrew & St. Luke Episcopal Church in Beacon when we present the fearsome, radical artistry of pianist John Blum and saxophonist Michael Foster. Both noted figures in the NYC musical underground, these ferociously talented firebrands will join forces for a passionate exploration of boundless creativity.

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