Crippled Symmetry (What Would Morton Feldman Do?): Celebrate Black History Month with the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble at BAVPA Thursday

Tuesday, February 23

Celebrate Black History Month with the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble at BAVPA Thursday

Thursday, February 25, 6:30 & 8pm--A Celebration of Black History: a Look at Buffalo and the Niagara Movement feat. KAHIL EL' ZABAR & THE ETHNIC HERITAGE ENSEMBLE (Chicago). Buffalo Academy for Visual & Performing Arts, 450 Masten Ave. Buffalo, N.Y. 14209 • (716) 816-4220 $6/3 adults/students of BAVPA, $15/10 general public

A multi-media, multi-disciplinary celebratory extravaganza featuring a collaboration between the students of Buffalo Academy for Visual & Performing Arts and Chicago's internationally renowned jazz legends Kahil El' Zabar & the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble.

Kahil El' Zabar (drums, percussion, voice)
Ernest Khabeer Dawkins (alto/tenor saxophone)
Corey Wilkes (trumpet/flugelhorn)

The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble was formed 35 years ago. Kahil El'Zabar is the founder of the band and led its first performance at Child City Arts Center, in Chicago, in 1973. This was a year after he had returned from the University of Ghana. His goal was to combine concepts of African American music making with the earlier roots of traditional African music and make it something new. After 35 years, this legendary band is still serving the people worldwide with their special brand of 21st century Griot music. The current band consists of the young trumpet titan, Corey Wilkes, along with Chicago Saxophone legend, Ernest Khabeer Dawkins and the award winning multi percussionist, vocalist, and composer, Kahil El'Zabar.

The EHE is now in the pantheon of jazz history. Few bands have lasted more than three decades and there are no signs of this illustrious ensemble slowing down. Their music conjures a spiritual journey to the inner self. It spans time through multiple expressions that transcend styles and genres. There is an extremely personal virtuosity to the EHE's way of making music. It appears simple on the surface, yet when one goes deeper in the music they are amazed at the density of form.

www.kahilelzabar.com

No comments:

Post a Comment

Who is Morton Feldman? (And Why Should I Care)?

A towering figure in 20th-century New Music, Morton Feldman radically re-imagined the possibilities of musical form through an approach to sound correlated with abstract painting. In 1973, Feldman became the Edgard Varèse Professor of Music at the University at Buffalo, a title he retained until his death in 1987. Feldman's tenure is emblematic of a renaissance period of progressive creative activity that brought Buffalo's cultural affiliations international acclaim.

What Would Morton Feldman Do? situates its speculations on multiple levels, firstly imagining the artist as an angry young man contemplating his social calendar. But WWMFD also addresses a larger crisis of relevance facing experimental culture in the 21st century. WWMFD builds on the city's radical legacy, but views history as a challenge to the present - what are you going to do NOW? WWMFD imagines its avant-classical hero wandering the crumbling streets in search of the new and the now, not through escapist longings for another era's modernisms but in concert with the cause of action necessitated by absence.

In this regard, WWMFD begins where Basta! Or Too Much! (We Will Always Know Ourselves), an avant-pop zine published locally from 1997-2001, left the page for the "stage." Collecting de facto proposals for civic reinvention utilizing the fractured experiments of Buffalo's postmodernist cultural community as blueprints, Basta! concerned itself not with art dialogue per se, but with changing what it means to grow up in a shrinking city. From these proposals (which tended to embrace rather than resist post-industrial existential crises) emerged a series of large scale multi-media events (Murder the Word) and ultimately, the performance program at Big Orbit Gallery. Big Orbit's "Soundlab" series, for which the venue of the same name was founded, was conceived of as a multi-faceted, continuously evolving "workshop" for the exploration of contemporary post-cultural incentives. Coming full circle, WWMFD hopes to re-contextualize Soundlab's explorations, and to include other relevant local sound and performance activities in its critical orbit.

Crippled Symmetry (What Would Morton Feldman Do?)

Choose Your Own Adventure

Tuesday, February 23

Celebrate Black History Month with the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble at BAVPA Thursday

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive

Family and Friends

Contributors

Followers

Who is Morton Feldman? (And Why Should I Care)?

Search This Blog