Steve Lantner, piano, with Joe Morris, Upright bass,Alan Chase, alto, soprano Luther Gray, drums
Where: The New School of Music (NSM) 25 Lowell St, Cambridge
When: 7/9/22, Saturday, 7:45 PM
Cost: $20, $15 seniors, students
Contact: Alex @ Creative Music Series,alexlemski@gmail.com, 617/800-7255
https://www.creativemusicseries.com
https://www.facebook.com/events/423423329650527/?
Improvisational Jazz from leading-edge musicians, each a leader in their own right!
“Their moods range from caffeinated and frenetic to thoughtful and subdued, with each member of the quartet holding the spotlight for a moment and none outshining the other” **.
“And Lantner\’s compositions bring together the best of the American and European avant-garde” **.“To give his free improvisations more structure, Lantner experiments loosely structured free improvisation at its finest” **.
** All About Jazz
“No doubt about it, the unrelenting drive of bass (Joe Morris) and drums (Luther Gray), gives the whole performance a great forward propulsion, with Lantner\’s piano and Allan Chase\’s sax taking the lead roles. But the real quality of the music lies in its structured openness. As Lantner describes it in the liner notes: \”Harmonically speaking, the sound that I am striving for in my music strikes a balance between consonance and dissonance, and I use the term \’resonance\’ to describe it”…They have played together a lot, and the third release with Lantner in the lead”. Free Jazz Collective, “Live in Munster” Hatology, 2008
Pianist Steve Lantner brings the disparate natures of a wide range of musical styles – free improvisation, jazz, and contemporary chamber – together to create an all-encompassing voice that is uniquely his. He is known for his originality, virtuosity, versatility and a style that places melody and harmony back on the improviser\’s palette alongside texture, velocity and abstraction. Part of his pursuit is to find a new language that embraces the deep traditions of Jazz without picking one side or the other in its dichotomy – to establish a style that embraces the breadth of all the developments at our disposal.
He has performed/recorded with Fred Anderson, Ken Vandermark, Joe McPhee, Joe Morris, Rashid Bakr, Sabir Mateen, Roy Campbell Jr., Dave Rempis, Kent Kessler, Michael Zerang, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Allan Chase, Joe Giardullo, Laurence Cook, Joe Maneri, Mat Maneri, Taylor Ho Bynum, Nate McBride, Bill Lowe, and many others.
The Quartet’s CD Given – Live in Münster (Hatology 663) received overwhelming praise from critics. He has released numerous recordings under his own name, all critically acclaimed.
Allan Chase a jazz saxophonist, composer, and educator. He has performed jazz and improvised music since 1974 with his own groups and with the Lewis Nash-Allan Chase Duo (1979-80), Your Neighborhood Saxophone Quartet (1981- present), Prima Materia with Rashied Ali (1992- 2000), the Steve Lantner Quartet with Joe Morris and Luther Gray (2002- present), and many other groups in a wide range of styles. He appears as a soloist on over fifty jazz recordings.
From 2008 to 2021, Chase chaired the Ear Training department at Berklee College of Music, where he continues to teach Ear Training and work with the students of the Global Jazz Institute. He has taught courses in jazz history, transcription and analysis, ear training, harmony, counterpoint, music theory, ensembles, and private lessons in saxophone and improvisation. He began his teaching career at Berklee in 1981, and has taught at Tufts University (1993-7) and New England Conservatory (1994-2012), where he served as chair of jazz studies, chair of contemporary improvisation, and dean of faculty.
Joe Morris has performed on bass or guitar with many of the most important contemporary artists in improvised music including, Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, John Zorn, Ken Vandermark, Mary Halvorson, Tyshawn Sorey, Tomeka Reid, Fay Victor, Tim Berne, William Parker, Sylvie Courvoisier, Agusti Fernandez, Peter Evans, David S. Ware, Joe Maneri, Dewey Redman, Sunny Murray, Wadada Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris, Marshall Allen, Barre Phillips, Barry Guy, Matthew Shipp, Sunny Murray, and many others.
Morris is featured as leader, co-leader, or sideman on more than 190 commercially released recordings on the labels ECM, ESPdisk, Clean Feed, Hat Hut, Aum Fidelity, Avant, OkkaDisk, Not Two, Soul Note, Leo, No Business, Rogue Art, Relative Pitch, Incus, RareNoise, Fundacja Sluchaj, and his own labels Riti and Glacial Erratic.
He has lectured and conducted workshops on his own music and on improvisation in the US, Canada, and Europe including at Princeton University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Bard College, University of Illinois, University of Alberta, and University of Guelph. He was the recipient of the 2016 Killam Visiting Scholar Award at University of Calgary. He has been on the faculty at Tufts University, Southern Connecticut State University, Longy School of Music of Bard College, and New School. Since 2000, he has been on the faculty in the Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation Department at New England Conservatory. Morris is the author of the book, Perpetual Frontier: The Properties of Free Music (Riti Publishing 2012).
Luther Gray, since moving to Boston in 2000,has become one of the most in demand drummers on the scene, playing Avant Garde, Free Jazz, and Modern Jazz. He worked extensively performing locally, touring and recording in Free Jazz bands with Joe Morris, Taylor Ho Bynum, Steve Lantner, Jim Hobbs, and Raquib Hassan, among others. Luther then began combining the Punk/Indy rock music and Free Jazz in various projects including his critically acclaimed band, Lawnmower. He also began playing with Modern Jazz innovators like Jerry Bergonzi, Phil Grenadier, and George Garzone, with whom he continues to play weekly engagements Monday nights at the Cambridge club, The Lilypad.
Along with the aforementioned musicians, Luther has also performed with Anthony Braxton, Joe Lovano, Ken Vandermark, Henry Grimes, Nate Wooley, Cameron Brown, William Parker, Mat Maneri, Joseph Daly, Bill Pierce, Ben Monder, Tony Malaby, and countless others over the past 25 years. He has played festivals and concerts all over the world, and recorded for the record labels, AUM Fidelity, ESP, HatHUT, NotTwo, Clean Feed, Rogue Art, Atavistic.
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