Vox Populi AUX and Fire Museum are proud to present the Daniel Levin Quartet featuring a number of stellar contemporary artists with the Bobby Zankel Group. Prepare for a roof-raising night of nationally acclaimed avant-garde music!
Daniel Levin Quartet:
Cellist Daniel Levin’s drummerless quartet occupies a musical space bordered by many kinds of music, but fully defined by none of them. Elements of European classical music, American jazz, microtonal and new music, and European free improvisation all figure prominently in the band’s unique sound. But as critic Chris Mays observes in All About Jazz, “Like all the most successful post-modern creative ventures, Levin’s quartet positions its antecedents in plain sight, but rises above them to create something novel, fascinating and unmistakably of its own time.” Levin and his quartet with trumpeter Nate Wooley, vibraphonist Matt Moran, and bassist Pedro Ström, is “a provocatively assembled group of adventurous musicians,” that makes music with “the wild chaos of nature somehow centered in a sense of harmonious majesty,” according to critic Donald Elfman.
Without drums, Levin and his band mates are free to explore rhythm, melody, timbre, and texture in extremely subtle and varied ways, creating an alluring braid of lines shaded by autumnal colors, vocal inflections, and precise dynamics. “This group is able to rethink the dynamics and dialectic of a “jazz” group and find new phrasing, spacing and modes of interaction,” notes Elfman. Levin’s compositions set a lyrical tone suffused with mystery and ambiguity. But the quartet remains poised and open to the possibilities offered by the music. “For all its balance and clarity,” says Point of Departure, “the music tempers its delicacy with a dark, unsentimental edge that pushes it past the polite banter of chamber jazz into something deeper and truer.”
Nate Wooley’s playing has often been cited as being a part of an international revolution in improvised trumpet. Along with Peter Evans and Greg Kelley, Wooley is considered one of the leading lights of the American movement to redefine the physical boundaries of the horn. A combination of vocalization, extreme extended technique, noise and drone aesthetics, amplification and feedback, and compositional rigor has led one reviewer to call his solo recordings “exquisitely hostile”.
Vibraphonist and tunesmith Matt Moran “plays the vibraphone like a speed-chess master, always darting off into flurries of ingenious, unexpected activity” (Village Voice). He has performed and recorded with artists as diverse as Mat Maneri, Lionel Hampton, Combustible Edison, Ellery Eskelin, and Saban Bajramovic. Moran’s sound is integral to an innovative group of New York musicians who blur the boundaries of composition, improvisation, and folk traditions.
“The ridiculously talented” (Number 1 Magazine) Portuguese-Scandinavian bassist Pedro Ström is a consistently innovative voice in the global Free Music community. He has contributed his big warm sound and unique harmonic mind to a vast array of performances, both live and on record. In the past few years, he has worked with Carlos Garnett, Sonny Fortune, Sonny Simmons, Ivo Perelman, Benny Golson, Benny Bailey, Mulato Aztatke, Jonas Kullhammar, Kresten Osgood, Lotte Anker, Fredrik Ljungqvist, Magnus Broo, and Martin Küchen, to name a few.
Bobby Zankel Group:
Bobby Zankel began playing music at an early age, soon favoring the alto saxophone. After studying at the University of Wisconsin, he attended Berklee College Of Music, then went on to attain a BA degree from Empire State College (State University of New York). In the early 70s, he attracted favorable attention during a spell with Cecil Taylor’s Unit Core Ensemble. Concurrently, Zankel’s reputation spread within the adventurous New York loft scene owing to performances with Ray Anderson, Sunny Murray, William Parker and others. From 1975, Zankel became resident in Philadelphia where he raised his family meanwhile becoming a respected and in-demand sideman with many artists, notably those associated with the city’s thriving jazz scene. Groups he was with in these years, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, include the Hank Mobley -Sonny Gillete Quintet, Jymmie Merritt’s Forerunners, Odean Pope’s Saxophone Choir, and Ruth Naomi Floyd. He continued to work with Taylor, including visiting Europe. As a performer, Zankel delivers intricate virtuoso bop playing with an intensely emotional core. Zankel was also continuing with his studies, now with Dennis Sandole, becoming a skilled and significant composer. As leader and sideman he has appeared at numerous festivals. His compositions have been performed by Lester Bowie, Coles, Marilyn Crispell, Pope, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Peterson and others. Active in music education, Zankel has been artist-in-residence at the Downington and Jarrettown schools, and has also been artist-in-residence for programmes within the Philadelphia prison system. He presently performs with his Warriors Of The Wonderful Sound. Tonight he will be joined by Michael Szekely on drums and Matt Engle on bass.
