We at Hallwalls are ecstatic to announce a very special concert event in celebration of our 40th anniversary—master bassist, composer and bandleader William Parker will present a unique expanded version of his long-standing ensemble In Order To Survive performing a new suite of compositions entitled "Cosmic Revelations". As a recipient of a 2014 Presenter Consortium For Jazz grant from Chamber Music America with support from the Doris Duke Foundation, Hallwalls has formed a partnership with Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut and Kerry Town Concert House in Ann Arbor, Michigan to produce and present this extraordinary project. This all-star ensemble features members of William Parker's flagship quartet with Hamid Drake on drums, Rob Brown on alto saxophone and Lewis Barnes on trumpet, along with NYC trombone stalwart Steve Swell, Philadelphia piano master Dave Burrell and one of New Orleans' true living legends of jazz, saxophonist Kidd Jordan. Join us in celebration at this one-of-a-kind concert experience!
William Parker is a master musician, improviser, and composer. He plays the bass, shakuhachi, double reeds, tuba, donso ngoni and gembri. He was born in 1952 in the Bronx, New York. He studied bass with Richard Davis, Art Davis, Milt Hinton, Wilber Ware, and Jimmy Garrison. He entered the music scene in 1971 playing at Studio We, Studio Rivbea, Hilly's on The Bowery and The Baby Grand, playing with many musicians on the avant-garde school Bill Dixon, Sunny Murray, Charles Tyler, Billy Higgins, Charles Brackeem, Alan Silva, Frank Wright, Frank Lowe, Rashid Ali, Donald Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Jimmy Lyons, Milford Graves and with traditionalists like Walter Bishop, Sr. and Maxine Sullivan. Early projects with dancer and choreographer Patricia Nicholson created a huge repertoire of composed music for multiple ensembles ranging from solo works to big band projects. Parker played in the Cecil Taylor unit from 1980 through 1991. He also developed a strong relationship with the European Improvised Music scene playing with musicians such as Peter Kowald, Peter Brotzmann, Han Bennink, Tony Oxley, Derek Bailey, Louis Sclavis, and Louis Moholo. He began recording in 1994 and leading his own bands on a regular basis founding two ensembles, In Order To Survive, and The Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra. In 2001, Parker released O'Neal's Porch, which marked a turn toward a more universal sound working with drummer Hamid Drake. The Raining on the Moon Quintet followed, adding vocalist Leena Conquest and the Quartet from O'Neal's Porch. Most notable among many recent projects is the Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield. He has taught at Bennington College, NYU, The New England Conservatory of Music, Cal Arts, New School University and Rotterdam Conservatory of Music. He has also taught music workshops throughout the world including Paris, Berlin and Tokyo and the Lower East Side. Parker is also a theorist and author of several books including the Sound Journal, Document Humanum, Music and the Shadow People and The Mayor of Punkville.
As Steve Greenlee of the Boston Globe stated in July 2002, "William Parker has emerged as the most important leader of the current avant-garde scene in jazz." He is working in many of the more important groups in this genre, some of the most prestigious being his own, i.e. The Curtis Mayfield Project, Little Huey Creative Orchestra, In Order to Survive, William Parker's Quartet and other groups. Mr. Parker is one of the most important composers in our time period, he is also a poet whose words are beginning to be heard in various media: in print, in song and in his theatre piece, "Music and the Shadow People."
In '95 the Village Voice characterized William Parker as "the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time." However from the beginning of his career Mr. Parker has commanded a unique degree of respect from fellow musicians. In 1972 at the age of 20, Parker quickly became the bass player of choice among his peers. Within a short time he was asked to play with older, established musicians such as Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry, Bill Dixon, Milford Graves, Billy Higgins, Sunny Murray, etc. In 1980 he became a member of the Cecil Taylor Unit, in which he played a prominent role for over a decade.
Mr. Parker has released over 20 albums under his leadership. Not surprisingly, most of his albums have hit #1 on the CMJ charts. In 1995 after years of obscurity as a leader, he released Flowers Grow In My Room, on the Centering label. This was the first documentation of the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra. This CD hit #1 on the CMJ charts and The Little Huey began to travel. They have performed in the Verona Jazz Festival and Banlieues Bleues among others. William Parker's new Quartet has hit with rave reviews for both albums "O'Neals Porch" and "Raining on the Moon."
These releases and their success highlight William Parker as an outstanding composer and band leader. From the beginning of his musical career, William Parker has been prolific; composing music for almost every group with whom he has performed. His compositional skills span a range including operas, oratorios, ballets, film scores, and soliloquies for solo instruments. He has also successfully explored diverse concepts in instrumentation for large and small ensembles. William Parker is a poet, with three volumes published thus far: "Music Is," "Document Humanum," and "The Shadow People."
"He (William Parker) is something of a father figure" stated Larry Blumenfeld in a New York Times article this past May. He has looked for and encouraged young talent and has been a mentor to some of the younger musicians. Most importantly, for Mr. Parker has been the workshops/ performances for young people that he has conducted, both in the USA and in Europe. This has been for him amongst some of his most important work and greatest successes."
Edward "Kidd" Jordan's multi-faceted legacy is among of the most influential and enduring in the history of improvised music. An integral part of the seminal musical tapestry of New Orleans, he is the patriarch of one of the city's most respected musical families and his parallel careers as a performer and educator span the past six decades. He has worked most of his life outside the mainstream spotlight, tirelessly sustaining the jazz continuum through both his teaching and his cutting edge performances all around the globe with like-minded improvisers.
Born on May 5th, 1935 in Crowley, Louisiana, about two and a half hours Northwest of New Orleans, Jordan grew up in Cajun country listening to zydeco and blues music before hearing Charlie Parker, Lester Young and other jazz musicians while in high school. By his freshman year in college at Southern University in Baton Rouge, where he studied music, he was playing professionally with local groups. After graduating in 1955, he relocated to New Orleans and began pursuing two of the trademark elements of his career: teaching music and working in pit bands and pick-up groups with the wide variety of prominent musicians passing through the city. That year he also became the brother-in-law of life-long musical partner, and fellow New Orleans jazz legend, Alvin Batiste.
After teaching music in high schools, and eventually college, during the day, he spent his nights performing with groups ranging from the casts of traveling Broadway shows to the major jazz, soul, blues and Motown artists of the time. The list includes Tony Bennett, Big Maybelle, Ray Charles, Natalie Cole, Billy Eckstine, Guitar Slim, Aretha Franklin, Lena Horne, Earl King, Gladys Knight, Esther Phillips, The Four Tops, The O'Jays, The Temptations, Big Joe Turner, Nancy Wilson and Stevie Wonder among others. Living and working in New Orleans, he also performed and recorded with the city's most recognizable local talent, including Johnny Adams, the Neville Brothers (in an early band called The Hawkettes) and Professor Longhair. He would later perform as a featured soloist with the New Orleans Philharmonic.
Although he is closely associated with the native music scene of New Orleans, where he lived for more than 50 years before being displaced from his home by Hurricane Katrina, Jordan has also taught and performed all around the world. His penchant for free improvisation, and travels to the jazz meccas of New York and Chicago, where he earned his Master's at Milliken University and did other post-graduate study at Northwestern University, led to his best-known work in the jazz avant-garde with the likes of Muhal Richard Abrams, Ed Blackwell, Hamiet Bluiett, Ornette Coleman, Julius Hemphill, David Murray, Sunny Murray, Sun Ra and Archie Shepp. Chicago-based musicians, and founding members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Fred Anderson and Alvin Fielder, are two of his most familiar musical partners, as is Chicago native, Joel Futterman.
Before retiring in the summer of 2007, Jordan was a professional teacher for more than 50 years. His former students include such high-profile names as Terence Blanchard, Branford and Wynton Marsalis and Nicholas Payton, and his teaching work was instrumental in the development of such noted ensembles as the World Saxophone Quartet and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. He also worked extensively with children in the New Orleans public schools, as well as in countries such as Mali, Senegal and Sierra Leone, where he was involved with educational programs.
The culmination of his teaching career came in 1990, when he was named the founding director of the Heritage School of Music at Southern University's New Orleans campus (SUNO), where he oversaw the jazz studies program and jazz ensembles. The school was created by the Jazz and Heritage Foundation, the organization behind the world famous New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, at which Jordan has performed annually since 1975. He also served as Artistic Director of the Louis Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp for more than a decade starting in 1995. His work as an educator was documented by the CBS News program, 60 Minutes, and in 2006 he was honored by the New Orleans music publication, Offbeat, with its first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award for Music Education. He was also named a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government in 1985.
Though highly regarded by both aficionados and his fellow musicians, Jordan's work as a performer has gone largely undocumented over the years. His recordings as a leader/coleader, most of which have come since the mid-to-late 1990's, have been released by the AUM Fidelity, Boxholder, Drimala, Eremite, Flying Note and Thirsty Ear labels, earning best-of- the-year honors along the way. AllAboutJazz.com's Troy Collins called one of Jordan's latest, Palm of Soul(AUM Fidelity, 2006) with William Parker and Hamid Drake, "spiritually revelatory free jazz, hauntingly beautiful and emotionally resonant."
"Jordan unrolls color variations on his tenor that make his one instrument come across like an orchestra," declared JazzReview.com's Lyn Horton. Other critics have called him "a gutsy tenor saxophonist and musical patriarch from New Orleans" (Nate Chinen, New York Times), "among the most under-rated of musicians, a fountain of torrid energy and exalted invention" (Stuart Broomer,Coda) and "as overlooked by the general jazz audience as he has been revered by the fortunate players he's mentored over the decades" (Derk Richardson, The Absolute Sound). Bagatellen's Derek Taylor adds, "On the stage he's known for shedding any physical semblance of his seventy-odd years and threatening the structural integrity of his saxophone's ligature with volcanic upper register multiphonics that are among the most potent and precisely-deployed amongst his peers."
"Nowadays," Jordan explained in a recent interview, "everybody just wants to play the same stuff that everybody else is playing. Same solos, same licks, and I can see that, because everybody wants to be accepted, but I don't care about that. The minute someone wants to pat me on the back about something is the minute I'm ready to leave. You've got to know yourself and what you're capable of doing and how you want to do it. I guess I've always been hardheaded, because around New Orleans people been telling me I'm the last free man for the last twenty years. It's not a popular road. You stand a lot of abuse to play this music. But you got to stick to what you want to do."
Distinguished composer-pianist Dave Burrell is a performing artist of singular stature on the international contemporary music scene. His dynamic compositions with blues and gospel roots recall the tradition of Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington, as well avant garde composers Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. After majoring in music at the University of Hawaii, he enrolled at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts in 1961. After graduating with degrees in composition/arranging and performance in 1965, he moved to New York City, where he quickly established himself as one of the most innovative and original pianists, collaborating with the emerging leaders in contemporary jazz, joining the groups of saxophonists Marion Brown, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp.
Dave Burrell appears regularly on national and international radio broadcasts, NPR's Bi-Centennial Tribute to Jelly Roll Morton, Dr. Jazz; Duke Ellington's Centennial Duke and the Piano; Louis Armstrong's The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, and Leonard Bernstein: An American Life. Dave Burrell was featured on NPR's nationally syndicated show Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross. Burrell performed the music of Jelly Roll Morton solo piano, The Lomax Legacy: Folklore in a Globalizing Century symposium, along with jazz author and scholar John Szwed, presented by American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress and at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, Washington, D.C. RAI, Italy recently aired "Dave Burrell Plays His Songs" featuring singer Leena Conquest and lyricist Monika Larsson.
Recent solo piano performances: Le Mans Jazz Festival, France, Sala Venni, Florence, San Servolo Meeting, Venice, Italy, Berlin Brandenburg Jazz Festival, and his solo piano after hours performances Dave Burrell 'Round Midnight at Bimhuis, Amsterdam, Holland. The next weekly engagement at Bimhuis is scheduled for the fall of 2014. Recent duos include Leena Conquest: Catanzaro, Italy and Theatre Paul Eluard, Cugnaux, France; Archie Shepp: Duc des Lombardes, Paris, France; Han Bennink: Philadelphia Art Alliance; Silke Eberhard: Berlin Jazz Festival, Institute Francais, Berlin; and most recently, with bassist William Parker at the Sons d'Iver Festival Le Kremlin-Bicetre, France on February 1, 2014. Dave Burrell Trio performed at Casa di Popolo Jazz Festival, Montreal, and Poisson Rouge, New York.
As a composer-in-residence at Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, Dave Burrell's commissions include "Look Again" - African-American History is American History: Bill of Sale for a Slave. (2007), Syllables of the Poetry of Marianne Moore (2008), Western Extension of the United States of America 1811 (2009). In 2010 Burrell launched the start of a 5 year project at Rosenbach Museum and Library, The American Civil War 1861-1865. The first installment, Portraits of Civil War Heroes, premiered in 2011, followed by Civilians During War Time in 2012, with guest violinist Odessa Balan, and Turning Point with guest trombonist Steve Swell. Listening to Lincoln with guest soprano Veronica Chapman-Smith and lyricist Monika Larsson to premiere on April 10 and 12, 2014.
By the close of the 1990s, Hamid Drake was widely regarded as one of the best percussionists in improvised music. Incorporating Afro-Cuban, Indian, and African percussion instruments and influence, in addition to using the standard trap set, Drake has collaborated extensively with top free jazz improvisers Peter Brotzmann, Fred Anderson, and Ken Vandermark, among others. Drake was born in Monroe, LA, in 1955, and later moved to Chicago with his family. He ended up taking drum lessons with Fred Anderson's son, eventually taking over the son's role as percussionist in Anderson's group. As a result, Fred Anderson also introduced Drake to George Lewis and other AACM members. Drake also has performed a wide range of world music; by the late '70s, he was a member of Foday Muso Suso's Mandingo Griot Society and he has played reggae music extensively. Drake has been a member of the Latin jazz band Night on Earth, the Georg Graewe Quartet, the DKV Trio, Peter Brotzmann's Chicago Octet/Tentet, and Liof Munimula, the oldest free improvising ensemble in Chicago. Drake has also worked with trumpeter Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Fred Anderson, Mahmoud Gania, bassist William Parker (in a large number of lineups), and has performed a solstice celebration with fellow Chicago percussionist Michael Zerang semiannually since 1991. Hamid Drake recorded material is best represented on Chicago's Okkadisk label.
Rob was born in Hampton, VA in 1962. He has been playing the saxophone since the age of 11. He moved to NY in 1984, and since then has been actively leading groups or working as a sideman with Matthew Shipp, Wiliiam Parker, Craig Taborn, Gerald Cleaver, Daniel Levin, Joe Morris, Whit Dickey.
Others that Rob has performed and/or recorded with include Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Denis Charles, Bill Dixon, Butch Morris, Reggie Workman, Henry Grimes, Roy Campbell Jr., Hamid Drake and Fred Hopkins, as well as various dance groups, poets, and performance artists. He has toured Europe extensively. He is a 2001 CalArts/Alpert/Ucross Residency Prize winner and has received many Meet The Composer Fund grants. In 2006 Rob was awarded a Chamber Music America New Works grant.
Influenced by Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, Booker Little and Thad Jones; trumpeter, Lewis 'Flip' Barnes is Virginia born, NYC reared and Howard University educated. Barnes is a member of The Little Huey Orchestra, The Inside The Songs of Curtis Mayfield project (with Amiri Baraka, Leena Conquest, Darryl Foster, Sabir Mateen, and Dave Burrell) and Greg Tate's collective Burnt Sugar. He has also worked and/or recorded with saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc, guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly, The Holmes Brothers, Norah Jones, drummer William Hooker, the JC Hopkins Biggish Band, Chris Becker, Noizland, and numerous other musical projects. Branes has written and recorded original music for two films by Actress/Cinematographer Sandye Wilson, "So Many Things to Consider" and "notsoprivatethoughts". His work with bassist William Parker's quartet and Raining of the Moon project has led to many tours, festival performances and CD recordings.
Born in Newark, NJ, Steve Swell has been an active member of the NYC music community since 1975. He has toured and recorded with many artists from mainstreamers such as Lionel Hampton and Buddy Rich to so called outsiders as Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor and William Parker. He has over 40 CDs as a leader or co-leader and is a featured artists on more than 100 other releases. He runs workshops around the world and is a teaching artist in the NYC public school system focusing on special needs children.
Swell has worked on music transcriptions of the Bosavi tribe of New Guinea for MacArthur fellow, Steve Feld in 2000. His CD, "Suite For Players, Listeners and Other Dreamers" (CIMP) ranked number 2 in the 2004 Cadence Readers Poll. He has also received grants from USArtists International in 2006, MCAF (LMCC) awards in 2008 and 2013 and has been commissioned twice on the Interpretations Series at Merkin Hall in 2006 and at Roulette in 2012.
Steve was nominated for Trombonist of the Year 2008 & 2011 by the Jazz Journalists Association, was selected Trombonist of the Year 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2012 by the magazine El Intruso of Argentina and received the 2008 Jubilation Foundation Fellowship Award of the Tides Foundation. Steve has also been selected by the Downbeat Critics Poll in the Trombone category from 2010-2014.
Steve is presently a teaching artist through the American Composers Orchestra, Healing Arts Initiative , Mind-Builders Creative Arts Center (Bronx), the Jazz Foundation of America and Leman Manhattan Preparatory School.
Steve was also awarded the 2014 Creative Curricula grant (LMCC) for the project: "Metamorphoses: Modern Mythology in Sound and Words" which was taught in a month long residency at Baruch College Campus High School in Manhattan.
