Tue 4/1 @ 8PM
Cleveland has a couple of organization dedicated to presenting challenging avant-garde and experimental music. One of them is New Ghosts, now celebrating its 10th anniversary of doing so, back at Now That’s Class.
Most of its recent shows have been co-hosted with the BOP STOP, and that’s where their upcoming show will be, when they present BALLISTER, a trio featuring two Chicago-based musicians — sax player Dave Rempis and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm — and one Norwegian, PNL, on drums. The improvisational ensemble came together in 2009. Their bio tells us that their “sliding and overlapping rhythms often give the music a feeling as if a rug is slowly being pulled out from underneath the listener while the music still maintains a strong forward momentum,” influenced by predecessors such as the 70s and 80s music of alto sax player/composer Julius Hemphill, Miles’ Davis’ early ’70s electric bands, and Ornette Coleman’s free jazz/funk ensemble Prime Time. Together, BALLISTER has released 11 albums including last year’s Smash and Grab, and toured both Europe and North America extensively.
They’ll be joined at the BOP STOP by Chicago vibraphone player Jason Adasiewicz, a major figure in the improvised music scene. He’ll be performing solo transcriptions of music by 84-year-old jazz sax/flute player Roscoe Mitchell, an influential musician from Chicago’s avant-garde music scene with such groups as the Art Ensemble of Chicago (which he founded) and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).
Tickets are $20, but like their fellow presenters of experimental, improvisatory music, the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project (CUSP) they say no one will be turned away because they don’t have enough money. And that’s not an April Fool joke — in this scene, presenters are evangelists for the musicians.
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