Patrick Zimmerli Quartet at Philadelphia Art Alliance

Ars Nova Workshop is pleased to present the Patrick Zimmerli Quartet, performing the Philadelphia premiere of a new work for the saxophonist/composer with pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Chris Tordini, and drummer John Hollenbeck.

Based in both New York City and Paris, saxophonist and composer Patrick Zimmerli bridges jazz and contemporary classical music. His newest piece, “Clockworks,” was supported by a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works grant and assembles a quartet of musicians who are each genre-blurring composers in their own right. Zimmerli describes the piece as being “about scales of time: time within a beat, within a phrase, a movement, a piece, and within an oeuvre, over a span of decades… More generally, the piece is about what it has been like to live in a changing society from the late eighties through the present.” The program will also feature a selection of early work by Zimmerli, whose Aspects of Darkness and Light, an evening-length suite for saxophonist Joshua Redman, bassist Scott Colley, percussionist Satoshi Takeishi, and the Brooklyn Rider string quartet, will be released by Nonesuch in early 2017....

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Ars Nova Workshop is pleased to present the Patrick Zimmerli Quartet, performing the Philadelphia premiere of a new work for the saxophonist/composer with pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Chris Tordini, and drummer John Hollenbeck.

Based in both New York City and Paris, saxophonist and composer Patrick Zimmerli bridges jazz and contemporary classical music. His newest piece, “Clockworks,” was supported by a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works grant and assembles a quartet of musicians who are each genre-blurring composers in their own right. Zimmerli describes the piece as being “about scales of time: time within a beat, within a phrase, a movement, a piece, and within an oeuvre, over a span of decades… More generally, the piece is about what it has been like to live in a changing society from the late eighties through the present.” The program will also feature a selection of early work by Zimmerli, whose Aspects of Darkness and Light, an evening-length suite for saxophonist Joshua Redman, bassist Scott Colley, percussionist Satoshi Takeishi, and the Brooklyn Rider string quartet, will be released by Nonesuch in early 2017.

“Zimmerli’s own compositions,” writes Frank J. Oteri in New Music Box, “prove that a musical goldmine can result when minimalist compositional processes are subjected to improvisational whimsy.”

That combination seems tailor-made for Zimmerli’s quartet. In addition to the composer/leader, whose work has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Town Hall and the SFJazz Center as well as at concert halls in London, Paris, Brazil and Vienna, the band features pianist Ethan Iverson, who has played the music of everyone from Stravinsky to David Bowie as well as his own eclectic compositions as co-founder of The Bad Plus; bassist Chris Tordini, who has toured and recorded with Andy Milne’s Dapp Theory and projects led by drummer/composer Tyshawn Sorey and trombonist/composer Michael Dessen; and drummer John Hollenbeck, renowned for his inventive writing for his Large Ensemble and Claudia Quintet.

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