Bert Seager's Kombucha and Carla Kihlstedt's Rabbit Rabbit at Regattabar

I have been invited to take part in a major music festival taking place this autumn in Boston called, “The Possibilities are Endless: 40 Years of NEC’s Contemporary Improvisation.”
Forty years ago Gunther Schuller, then president of the New England Conservatory, started the department of Contemporary Improvisation where I teach. It is multi-genre department that teaches students how to learn, conceive, write, and improvise music by ear. We ask our students to utilize their personal influences and juxtapose them with all kinds path-breaking models that we expose them to. This nurtures the development of a personal style. And this describes to me exactly what has happened to the music scene anyway. The boundaries between musical...

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I have been invited to take part in a major music festival taking place this autumn in Boston called, “The Possibilities are Endless: 40 Years of NEC’s Contemporary Improvisation.”
Forty years ago Gunther Schuller, then president of the New England Conservatory, started the department of Contemporary Improvisation where I teach. It is multi-genre department that teaches students how to learn, conceive, write, and improvise music by ear. We ask our students to utilize their personal influences and juxtapose them with all kinds path-breaking models that we expose them to. This nurtures the development of a personal style. And this describes to me exactly what has happened to the music scene anyway. The boundaries between musical
categories are gone. And artists are encouraged and expected to be themselves.
This is the only music department of its kind that I know of - and it is thrilling to be part of such a vibrant, imaginative, collaborative scene, right here in Boston.
It is a huge honor to be part of the festival with my trio, Kombucha, sharing the bill at the Regattabar in The Charles Hotel in Harvard Square in Cambridge on Wednesday night, October 17 with Carla Kihlstedt and her group, Rabbit Rabbit. Carla, also on the Contemporary Improvisation faculty, exemplifies to me its essence: discovering new ways of creating and playing music, as a composer, performer and improviser.
Carla is an incredible violinist, singer, and song writer with commanding abilities to express colors, power, emotion and theatricality in her work. She is also world-class virtuoso.
The very different approaches to our music and the contrast of our styles will make for an engaging evening. It should be evident how deeply we both care about the sounds we create, the primacy of feeling in our performances, and how the spaces in our music make clear that in listening deeply one can experience the sense of mysterious connection that bridges the gap between us.

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