Cultural Constructions Fall 2004
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Press Release
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Glenn Dickson, Glynis Lomon, Mister Rourke, Yakov Gubanov photo credit: Michael McLaughlin |
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Saturday, November 13th at 8pm
On Saturday, November 13th at 8pm, four musicians, each representing a different cultural and musical tradition, will come together at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Theater to exchange ideas and musical vocabularies in a concert entitled Cultural Constructions IV: Klezmer meets the Ukraine meets Free Jazz meets Hip-Hop. This is the fourth event in the semi-annual Cultural Constructions series founded in May 2003 and curated by Boston-area composer/musicians Michael McLaughlin, Ellen Band, Tom Hall, Ken Field, and Jonathan LaMaster. This season's concert features Klezmer clarinetist Glenn Dickson, Ukranian-born pianist Yakov Gubanov, improvising cellist Glynis Lomon, and pioneering turntablist Mister Rourke. Each musician will perform solo, documenting his/her musical specialty in its own context, and the quartet will perform music by curators Hall and McLaughlin, along with new collectively composed and improvised works created during a month of rehearsals and cross-cultural dialogue. Funded by LEF New England, and produced in cooperation with the Boston Creative Music Alliance (BCMA), the Cultural Constructions series has been profiled in the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, and Weekly Dig, and earned annual acclaim for its capacity to bring together musicians with strong ties to both Boston and a wide range of musical styles and cultural traditions. Past participants, all area musicians and/or local conservatory faculty, have represented ethnic Turkish, Chinese, Andalusian and Latino musical traditions, as well as musical styles like free improvisation, bluegrass, and world music, among many others. Latin percussionist Abraham Gomez-Delgado, one of last season's participants, summed up the collective cross-cultural creative process in a quote for the Boston Globe. "It's like going out for pizza with strangers," he says. "You never know who's going to want anchovies." Glenn Dickson is the bandleader and clarinetist of the traditional klezmer band Shirim and the avant-klezmer band Naftule's Dream. With Shirim he has recorded 7 CDs, including the newly released collaboration with author/artist Maurice Sendak, "Pincus and the Pig." Shirim has toured internationally, and was featured on the soundtrack of Woody Allen's "Deconstructing Harry." With Naftule's Dream he has produced 4 CDs, toured Europe and played at the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Berlin Jazz Festival, and the New York Jazz Festival. Additionally, Glenn has won the Massachusetts Cultural Council Arts Grant for composition. Recently he has been performing solo concerts using digital looping technology. Cellist Glynis Lomon went to Bennington College to continue her classical cello studies in 1973 where she met and began performing with musician/composer Bill Dixon. The music of Dixon's ensemble combined the exploration of the frontier of sound that she loved with rich rhythms, emotional expression, and the art and science of improvisation. Glynis has been privileged to play with Bill Dixon, Arthur Brooks, Jimmy Lyons, Cecil Taylor, Butch Morris, Syd Smart, William Parker, Greta Buck, Dennis Warren, Lowell Davidson, and many others. Recently she has been playing with pianist Eric Zinman in collaborations with Sabir Mateen, Blaise Siwula, Laurence Cook and others. Ukrainian pianist Yakov Gubanov graduated from the department of composition of the Moscow Conservatory in 1976. During his studies, he took private lessons in composition with Dmitri Shostakovich. For the past ten years he has given courses and lectures at Harvard University, Weimar Music Academy, and the Universities of Venice and Padua. Presently he is an Associate Professor of composition at Berklee College of Music and the composer in residence at the Harvard Film Archive. In the course of the last eight years, he has given over 500 live accompaniments for silent films. He has performed at numerous international film festivals, including "Le giornate del cinema muto" (Italy) and the Seattle International Film Festival. Scratching and mixing with an infinite cast of Boston and New York's top musicians since 1989, Mister Rourke is considered a pioneer of using the turntable in a live band setting. His work, which has earned him three Boston Music Awards, has been featured in Billboard Magazine, MTV's The Real World and HBO's The Chris Rock Show. Recently completing back to back tours with Club d'Elf and Soulive, Rourke's current projects include: The Chop Shop (every Thursday at The B-Side Lounge), The Turntable Demolition Team (an improvisational scratch symphony), the musical soundtrack for Sony Playstation game Parappa the Rapper 2, and Turntables as an Instrument, a DJ workshop he developed and teaches at middle schools, non-profit organizations, music festivals, and colleges.
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