"Miles Beyond:
The New Sounds of Trumpet", NPR August, 2010: "There are hidden secrets in the horn and a host of musical linguists uncovering new languages...FORBES GRAHAM doesn't ignore it. He embraces the blue note and turns it "magenta haze." The Boston-area improviser sputters and attacks the trumpet with shark-attack notes before letting out a haunting whistled horn like a meditative Don Cherry, or a gruffled stutter like a duck being strangled".
“For more than 50 years, Syd Smart has been a hidden gem in the Boston music scene; hidden, that is, unless you know where to look. Smart is a master percussionist who has carved out his own unique niche teaching and playing improvisational music that could be labeled free jazz or world music”. The Arts Fuse....
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"Miles Beyond:
The New Sounds of Trumpet", NPR August, 2010: "There are hidden secrets in the horn and a host of musical linguists uncovering new languages...FORBES GRAHAM doesn't ignore it. He embraces the blue note and turns it "magenta haze." The Boston-area improviser sputters and attacks the trumpet with shark-attack notes before letting out a haunting whistled horn like a meditative Don Cherry, or a gruffled stutter like a duck being strangled".
“For more than 50 years, Syd Smart has been a hidden gem in the Boston music scene; hidden, that is, unless you know where to look. Smart is a master percussionist who has carved out his own unique niche teaching and playing improvisational music that could be labeled free jazz or world music”. The Arts Fuse.
“… bassist Jacob William is the revelation of the album, Secondary Deviations, since no matter how good his frontline is, his open rhythmic pulse drives them on, slows them down, sets the tone and scene, like a solid and supple backbone that keeps the music focused and coherent”. Transientones.com
Forbes Graham is a composer, musician, sound artist, and visual artist whose work explores themes of simultaneity, perceptibility, transformation and collage. His work "Encounters I" for trumpet, electronics, and voices premiered at Roulette in 2019. He performed with Michael Pisaro at (the) co-incidence festival in 2017 and has appeared at other music festivals including High Zero, Vision, and The Thing InThe Spring. He was commissioned to write a piece for the Festival of New Trumpet, and has created work for the avant-rock ensemble Normal Love.
Graham is the creator and producer of "Beyond/Apex", a bi-weekly podcast dedicated to showcasing contemporary and experimental music. To date, this show has featured the works of over 100 composers and creatives, ranging from emerging artists such as Cecilia López and Claire Rousay to more established artists like George Lewis.
Syd Smart was born in Cleveland. His earliest percussion teachers were his father and older brother. Over the years, he studied with the likes of Chief Bey, Milford Graves, Makanda Ken McIntyre, Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Babatunde Olatunji, Steve Barrios, and Ibrahima Camara. Smart majored in Music Education at Central State University in Wilberforce, OH. He moved to the Boston area in the late ’60s, but in 1973 he received a Black Music Fellowship to teach and study at Bennington College in Vermont. Back in Boston, Smart formed the Boston Art Ensemble (after the Art Ensemble of Chicago) and founded Friends of Great Black Music, an organization dedicated to supporting local artists of color. He also cofounded Boston’s annual John Coltrane Memorial Concert, the first of which was held on July 17, 1977, in his own loft, which was located on the corner of Beach and Lincoln streets in Chinatown.
As if that weren’t enough, Smart also holds a Master’s degree in Education from Lesley University and has taught music in the Cambridge Public Schools. In 1992, he was a resident performing artist at Expo 92, the World Exposition held in Seville, Spain.
Born and raised in India, Jacob arrived via rare routes to play on the vast fields of Jazz and other creatively improvised and composed music. Jacob grew-up in a syncretic milieu; he attended parochial school and traveled extensively from a very young age. His earliest years in music were spent singing in choirs and being engaged in informal learning of a wide array of diverse hybrid music and playing various instruments. In his teens, Jacob started playing the bass guitar and soon began playing concerts and festivals all over India in the company of many forward-looking elder musicians who had a particularly deep interest in Jazz. Jacob moved to the U.S. in 1991 after receiving a scholarship to study music.
In 2001, Jacob received a Master of Arts in Music degree from Wesleyan University, where his studies and work combined ethnomusicology, world-music and experimental composition under the guidance of Anthony Braxton, Neely Bruce and Alvin Lucier. In the realm of world music, he also studied South-Indian vocal music with T. Viswanathan and percussion music with Ramanad Raghavan and David Nelson. During 1998-1999, he attended the New England Conservatory of Music and studied in the department of Third Stream Music / Contemporary Improvisation under Ran Blake and studied the bass with Cecil McBee and John Lockwood. From Berklee College of music, he earned a Bachelor of music degree in 1997 after studying Composition and Arranging while concentrating on jazz bass performance, and he studied with Bruce Gertz, Whit Browne and Rich Appleman. During this time, he also participated in Kenny Werner and Bob Brookmeyer master classes in composition and improvisation. He also privately studied jazz improvisation with John Laporta, Hal Crook and Charlie Banacos.
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