Craig Taborn, solo piano
Celebrating the release of his new recrding, Avenging Angel, which will be released on June 7th - please click on the link above to hear a few exceprts.
One show only! Seventy-five seats only!
Tickets: $15
THE CRITICS ARE ALREADY BUZZING:
“Taborn's genius (there's no other word for it) makes a world of whispered, wide-spaced figures, ringing overtones, evaporating echoes and glowering contrapuntal cascades as absorbing as if he were playing bebop's greatest hits. Some pieces slowly evolve as sporadically tapped treble notes ring out against quietly jagged chords, some are keyboard-sweeping torrents in which jazz phrases deviously lurk and wriggle, some foreground high sounds struck so hard that the aim seems to be to purge them of tonality, while others do the opposite and lose themselves in subtleties of texture, echo and harmonics.” John Fordham - The Guardian UK ...
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Craig Taborn, solo piano
Celebrating the release of his new recrding, Avenging Angel, which will be released on June 7th - please click on the link above to hear a few exceprts.
One show only! Seventy-five seats only!
Tickets: $15
THE CRITICS ARE ALREADY BUZZING:
“Taborn's genius (there's no other word for it) makes a world of whispered, wide-spaced figures, ringing overtones, evaporating echoes and glowering contrapuntal cascades as absorbing as if he were playing bebop's greatest hits. Some pieces slowly evolve as sporadically tapped treble notes ring out against quietly jagged chords, some are keyboard-sweeping torrents in which jazz phrases deviously lurk and wriggle, some foreground high sounds struck so hard that the aim seems to be to purge them of tonality, while others do the opposite and lose themselves in subtleties of texture, echo and harmonics.” John Fordham - The Guardian UK
“Taborn has proven himself a player of almost unparalleled encyclopedic depth, a quality he brings to Avenging Angel, his first solo piano record and his debut, as a leader, for ECM. As exhilarating as it is serene, and as evocatively melodic as it is unsettlingly recondite, it's a masterpiece of invention and evocation that places Taborn squarely amongst those other esteemed pianists who've contributed to ECM's pantheon of significant solo recordings. John Kelman - allaboutjazz
Please browse to this web address to hear an interview with Craig:
http://www.jazzink.blogspot.com/
ABOUT "AVENGING ANGEL":
Avenging Angel, a powerful, creative and rigorously uncompromising album, is the first unaccompanied solo disc in Craig Taborn’s discography as well as the first ECM recording issued under his name. The album was recorded in the exceptional acoustic of the recital room at Lugano’s Studio RSI, with Manfred Eicher producing.
The disc follows several distinguished ‘sideman’ appearances for ECM, including three Roscoe Mitchell albums – Nine To Get Ready, Composition / Improvisation Nos. 1, 2 & 3 and the recent Far Side – as well as Michael Formanek’s The Rub and Spare Change, Evan Parker’s Boustrophedon and David Torn’s Prezens. Taborn (born 1970) has been widely-valued for his resourcefulness as an improviser, in and out of the jazz tradition, since the early 1990s, when his work with saxophonist James Carter’s groups drew the attention of musicians, press and listeners alike. His own groups have since explored a range of options, and he’s also been at the forefront of experiments cross referencing jazz and electronics. In this regard his 2004 album Junk Magic (on the Thirsty Ear label), has been cited as a pioneering work, and Craig has repeatedly been voted #1 Rising Star Keyboardist in the DownBeat Critics Poll.
In the last few years, however, solo piano performance has become a priority for Craig Taborn. “If the areas of improvisation that I deal with are always ‘compositional’ in a certain sense, in this case a very focussed compositional approach is applied, rather than allowing a broader exploration to yield a result. Throughout this recording I’m honing in on specific details. The music is really improvised: I just start. But having started, I try to relate everything that happens, like the motivic or rhythmic and textural detail, to the initial ideas as closely as I can. In terms of my own playing I try to have things emerge from the musical material itself. And a lot of that can depend on the instrument, too [in Lugano, a Steinway D]: the sound of the piano itself and what it is generating. I’m interested in the history of piano music, certainly, but I’m not hearing the instrument quite in those terms. I’m experiencing it also as a pure sound source, very aware of the tones and the overtones and how the instrument is ringing. This music is not about ‘transcending the piano’ as much as it is about working with what is possible within it. ”
Amongst the album’s striking characteristics is the way in which Taborn balances density of sound-events and structural clarity. “I like transparency and I like the details to be clear. But I also like layering the sounds: I like a complex palette, multiple voices, multiple rhythms, but I also want to be able to discern things, including all the spectral details that come up. ”
Craig Taborn is on tour in May in Europe and June in the US playing solo concerts in the spirit of Avenging Angel. 2011 is set to be a busy year for the pianist, and the solo concert periods alternate with European and North American tours with the Michael Formanek Quartet.
http://player.ecmrecords.com/taborn
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