Peter Brötzmann and Joe McPhee tickets:

Let’s start here. This is a concert event and we have a commemorative ticket, no matter where you make your purchase.  Buy an advanced ticket and secure your seating for $20 in-person at Park Avenue CDs in Orlando or from anywhere in the wired world here.

The quick pitch: This is the chance to see these two legendary, wide-open masters of high energy music and proprietary extended wind instrument techniques in Orlando. The long read: Although this was a late addition to the cm5 2013 playbook, we gladly altered our careful work to make this a reality in town. View this concert both as a visceral fireworks-laden affair and as a pocket fundraising for all of you that have offered to help at varying levels. Since the reemergence of the Civic Minded 5- spurred on by the existence of the building of the Timucua white house- we’ve only asked for an admission for one other concert after altering our model from tickets to regular patrons (the cm5 members) and freely donating friends compelled by the music.

Peter Brötzmann and Joe McPhee, while born and raised during a very different time for their respective countries of Germany and the U.S., would be drawn to similar revolutions in the arts and are now known as regular collaborators in the world of improvised music, free jazz and world music. Both gentlemen started recording creative jazz-based music in the 1960′s. Both have had prominent record labels started to release their music. Both began as second-generation artists driven by “The New Thing” of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman and Jimmy Giuffre- all of whom were able to make readily available recordings to disseminate a more open, bracing language for jazz music. The combined discographies of Brötzmann and McPhee hovers between three and four hundred releases.

You can make some connections between Peter Brötzmann’s visual arts pedigree and his later developing musical career. The reedist’s still-produced paintings have strong emphasis on color, texture and shape, opposed to detailed replications of extant imagery. That’s a fair jumping off point for Brötzmann’s playing on soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass saxophones, a-clarinet, e-flat clarinet; bass clarinet and tarogato. The same departure point can apply to his compositional styles, never tracking very close to the American jazz musicians- including The New Thing pioneers- that provided the original impetus. The multi-reedist has developed and applied another pan-ecstatic, ritual music frame appending to his American predecessors and contemporaries, which were first strongly rooted in the blues form, eventually supplanted by pan-African and Far Eastern forms. Like many of his contemporaries, the America free music was suffused with the music and teachings of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. By the mid-1960′s, Brötzmann had toured with the world-traveling Don Cherry and returned to Germany to define the ground floor gestures of the countries’ new jazz scene. Bassist (1990′s cm5 concertizer) Peter Kowald, pianist Alex Von Schlippenbach, trumpeter Manfred Schoof, and drummer Sven-Ake Johannson. Aggregates of these players resulted in Brötzmann’s entry into DIY record making via 1967′s For Adolfe Sax and 1968′s iconic, rumbling freedom of Machine Gun. A long-standing trio of pianist Fred Van Hove and drummer Han Bennink- both previous cm5 guests- could be sourced via Berlin resident Jost Gebers’ Free Music Production (FMP) label. In addition to this trio, Brötzmann has been involved in a number of iconic outfits. The saxophonist was one surface of the gritty, diamond-hard electric jazz quartet Last Exit, with guitarist Sonny Sharrock, electric bassist Bill Laswell and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. A one-time Chicago project with Brötzmann has endured as the Chicago Octet/Tentet, full of composers and conductors including Joe McPhee.

Joe McPhee’s unusual aesthetic/instrumental flexibility could define his both his legendary status within the creative jazz music scene and the relative inability for a listener to sum up McPhee’s career with the catchphrase or conversational soundbite. If we were to arm you with your McPhee talking point, we could start with his tenor saxophone continuum along the lines of John Coltrane’s 1964 to 1967 astral, Pan-African spiritualism. He was first on record in 1969 with trombonist Clifford Thornton’s Freedom and Unity album, followed by again available releases Nation Time and Underground Railroad. In 1970 the Swiss label Hat Hut (later Hat Art and Hatology) started to release McPhee’s work, amongst which his solo statement Tenor arose. His collaborations on the three figure count discography echoes Don Cherry’s world travel with stops to record with another of the waiting myriad creative aggregates. Joe McPhee has appeared as a distinctive voice on tenor, alto and soprano saxophones, trombone, clarinets, pocket trumpet and valve trombone. Amongst McPhee’s best-known reoccurring projects include  Deep Listening Band collaborations with electronic and minimalist legend Pauline Oliveros, Trio X with bassist Dominic Duval and drummer Jay Rosen, and the afore-mentioned Chicago Octet/Tentet project. Manhattan’s free music State Of The Union-harkening Vision Festival honored Joe McPhee with their Lifetime Of Achievement in 2012. Looking back, McPhee appeared with electric guitarist Davey Williams and shakuhachi player Philip Gelb at the sonorous Rollins College Knowles Chapel in 1996 for one of the first proto-cm5/WPRK concerts. The multi-instrumentalist narrowed his focus to the soprano saxophone and pocket trumpet, ringing out the warm acoustics during the trio’s take on Duke Ellington’s sacred music standard Come Sunday and a solo take of his signature theme, Voices.

The Monday, June 3rd concert is your Orlando chance to witness two senior masters of their forms, both as soloists and duet partners. This rarified event amongst a week-long U.S. tour also doubles as a chance to participate in raising funds for more cm5 leaps of faith. Buy tickets here to support the cm5.

Participate in the Timucua instant arts community created at each event by appearing willing - described by composer Anthony Braxton as the “friendly experiencer.” Timucua encourages a small plate dish and a bottle of wine for community distribution. We’ll see you there.

More casually hot work from the cm5′s Jim Ivy. A limited edition, screenprinted poster is coming.

Groder’s forthcoming visit brings pianist Miano for a visit to UCF’s Jazz Studies class for a workshop on improvisation followed by a live communal affair between the parties playing out at Taste on Friday, April 5th. The concert begins at 8 p.m. at the College Park restaurant with a $10 admission.

The Sunday evening concert at Orlando’s unlikely suburban arts embed, the Timucua white house, supports the release of the duo’s FluiDensity recording. This Jazz On Edge concert has been promised to be largely improvised, keeping with the previous meetings between the trumpeter and pianist.

From the desk of Thad Anderson, the Director of the UCF Percussion Ensemble. UCF PE left a serious, indelible psychic mark on many experiencers at the Timucua white house on March 17th. You’ll witness a different environmental and dynamics take on Persephassa if you attend and add the final movement of Pléïades to your live Xenakis cap.

Saturday, March 30 @ 8:00 p.m. at the UCF Reflecting Pond

Two percussion sextets by Iannis Xenakis (Persephassa and Peaux from Pléïades) featuring members of the UCF Percussion Ensemble

This will be a momentous occasion taking place outdoors at UCF’s Reflecting Pond.  The audience will be encouraged to circle the pond to experience these seminal works for percussion.

With so much chatter about the singular output of Iannis Xenakis here, dive into this reverse chronology playlist from the remarkable Ulysses’ Classical app available through Spotify.

Click, download, plaster liberally.

After wringing our hands, meditating on how to get Zs to Orlando for quite a time, we were first able to dovetail on South By Southwest, then get the additional offer for a separate Zs solos evening. Yes. Our Zs residency will include a group concert and a DJ set after-party, then concluding with Zs solos plus Guardian Alien. The Zs collective performance carries a sense of ceremony and its parts certainly carries the same in a moderately atomized, but still identifiable form.

Diamond Terrifier

Northern Spy Records describes Diamond Terrifier as such:

DIAMOND TERRIFIER is Sam Hillmer of Zs. Diamond Terrifier is Sam’s saxophone and electronics solo incarnation. Named after the English translation of the Indo-Tibetan god-name Vajrabairahva, Diamond Terrifier is concerned with the potential positive qualities of destruction as mediated by noise/drone sheets of sound music.

Guardian Alien 

Thrill Jockey Records describes their artist this way:

Guardian Alien is a free-wheeling ensemble coming into its own, having found just the right balance between structured arrangements and wild abandon. Helmed by Greg Fox, who has lent his percussive force to the likes of Teeth Mountain, Dan Deacon, and Liturgy, the ensemble was initially an extension of his solo music (GDFX).

Read Village Voice’s Best Of Award naming Greg Fox Best Drummer in 2011.

Higgins

Described by The New Yorker magazine as one of the “prime movers of the local avant-garde”, and an “exacting avant-classical guitarist” by TimeOut NY, Patrick Higgins (b.1984) is a New York based composer/performer of experimental music. An active presence in the NYC independent music scene since 2004, Higgins composed and played guitar in the post-rock duo Animal. Recently, he has turned his attentions to the Baroque, arranging and performing the music of J.S. Bach for acoustic guitar and stereo electronics: Bachanalia. Among numerous other compositions for small ensemble and chamber orchestra, a recording of Higgins’ String Quartet No.2 is currently in production with the MIVOS Quartet. A record of video-game inspired electronic works is now available on ELE Records, Monkey Mountain.

Higgins compositions list and audio samples here.

Zs- 2013 version Sam Hillmer, Greg Fox, Patrick Higgins

Take this cm5 event as a challenge if you’d like. Find that friend or acquaintance that boasts liking “all types of music” and use March 17th as the night that reaffirms or squelches that oft-used, off-handed assertion. We’re proud to be able to assemble this double bill to reopen the question of how you approach listening to music and what exactly needs to be familiar, even among your favored artists.

After seeing a pair of UCF-TV concerts featuring the UCF Percussion Ensemble and their director Thad Anderson, we’ve been angling to include their consistently creative offerings somewhere west of their Alafaya/University outpost. They come downtown to  present the Iannis Xenakis spatially-arrayed Persephassa for six percussionists. The Xenakis biography is singularly more rich than most genealogy reports. Persephassa draws in the influence of the Greek goddess Persephone; goddess of the underworld and spring growth, telluric energy coursing near the earth’s surface, Fibonacci system-derived rhythmic notation and the composer’s complementary passion for architecture. Persephassa was commissioned by the Shah and Empress of Iran for the 1969 Shiraz Festival held on the ancient ruins of Persepolis. Xenakis created the composition as part of his architectural critiques of the formal concert hall with its perceptible boundaries separating performers from audience. The six multi-percussion stations of Persephassa are set up in a hex pattern that was initially intended to be arrayed around a lake with the audience inside the playing area afloat on watercraft. Many of the rhythmic figures of Persephassa are imitative as well as variants as they are passed around the spatial hex. A standard two-channel recording might give you a sense of direction and depth, but a live attendee inside the area of the six percussionists will have the best possible presence to interpret the composer’s intentions. The six members of the UCF Percussion will be paired on both sides of the second story balcony, opposing sides of the mid-room floor and on the stage at Timucua white house. You will be the transducers in the middle.

The Persephassa map- you are the PUBLIC

“(Zs) …creates conceptual art objects that set form and content against each other – like, say, a perfect birthday cake made out of sawdust, or a perfect hammer made of bird feathers.”  - New York Times

Our pitch for New York’s Zs is that however admirable their recorded output and performance aesthetic, they are less interested in sharing what has happened during their decade-plus existence than they are in building upon those events. The static and comfortable embrace of nostalgia- including their own earlier work- gets discarded for the celebration of evolution and perpetual motion. A present tense example is presenting site-specific multi-media shows as ambitious live remix events inviting outsiders to use the band’s decade celebration Score box as source materials. Attend their performances at Timucua and Lil’ Indies to likely hear none of that material from the current trio version with Zs veteran Sam Hillmer joined by new guys Patrick Higgins and Greg Fox. Our booking of this version of Zs is more an exercise in unknowns than knowns. The material performed could be sonorous meditations, seemingly tribalist rhythmic studies, minimalist compositional structures, no-wave lineage noisy disruptions,  a combination of these parts, or something else. While the recorded output of Zs commenced with a mirroring tenor saxophone, electric guitar and drum kit sextet primarily performing notated, rebel modern classical compositions, the current Zs have reverted to an internalized folk process of non-notated music modified when the collective evolutionary spirit is present. We’ll witness Zs following their state of the union visit to this year’s South By Southwest conference. Expect them to amend those statements from Austin, Texas once they reach Orlando.

Participate in the Timucua instant arts community created at each event by appearing willing - described by composer Anthony Braxton as the “friendly experiencer.” Timucua encourages a small plate dish and a bottle of wine for community distribution. We’ll see you there.

Jazz In The Bible Belt has been a Sunday fixture on WPRK 91.5 fm-Rollins College for better than 20 years. The original efforts to create the cm5 emanated from DJs, student and community alike, at WPRK in the second half of the 1990′s. Jazz In The Bible, currently at 6-8 pm EST Sunday is DNA linkage to the cm5. Find it under College/University at the Radio button on iTunes. Find it here online:

http://asp4.rollins.edu/wprk/ or http://streema.com/radios/WPRK_FM_91.5