Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson: trumpet
Transformational Music Ensemble:
Keir Neuringer: saxophone
Mike Watson: bass clarinet, piccolo
Ryan T. Frazier (Heru Shabaka-Ra): trumpet
Dan Blacksberg: trombone
Tara Middleton: violin
Veronica MJ: viola
Tom Kraines: cello
Matt Engle: bass
Julius Masri: drums

This performance will feature new compositions by Jalalu-Kalvert
Nelson and Keir Neuringer for the Transformational Music Ensemble
(TME). Nelson is a composer and trumpet player born in Oklahoma City
and living in Biel, Switzerland since 1994. Active as an educator,
improviser, and composer for dance, film, installation, and the
concert stage, he studied with Iannis Xenakis and John Eaton at
Indiana University and Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood, and was awarded
the first John W. Work III Composition Fellowship. In 1974, Nelson
moved to New York and worked in the field of Creative Music Education
for the next two decades. He is opposed to placing his work in a
specific category. For Nelson, Jazz music, classical music, African
music, American folk music and Asian music are all part of his
“musical heritage” and language as an artist. He shares Takemitsu’s
philosophy that “music is like a mountain and you take from it what
you need.” No category in the music as well as in the person.

Keir Neuringer is a composer and saxophonist based in Philadelphia
since 2012. He first brought the Philadelphia musicians in TME
together in May 2014 to perform the Ars Nova Workshop-commissioned
William Parker composition Flower in a Stained Glass Window. The
ensemble thus cut its teeth alongside our elder luminaries Parker,
Dave Burrell, Marshall Allen, Odean Pope, Bobby Zankel, and Muhammad
Ali. TME went on to perform in an expanded version of the work at
Roulette in Brooklyn earlier this year, as part of Parker’s 25-member
Tone Motion Theater, where we met and played with Jalalu-Kalvert
Nelson, as well as Cooper-Moore, Joe McPhee, Fay Victor, Larry Roland,
Mazz Swift, Steve Swell, and many other inspirational figures.