SHOWTIMES
Friday, November 15, 7 PM PST
Saturday, November 16, 10 AM PST
Tickets: $16/14/12/10
Advance tickets and info 604 876-9343 Western Front – 303 East 8th Avenue (Tue-Fri. 12 – 5 pm)
H.R. MacMillan Planetarium – 1100 Chestnut
Opening Reception: all ticket holders welcome
November 15, 6:00 PM
H.R. MacMillan Planetarium
No Host Bar – hors d’oeuvres are on us!
Into the heavens – Across time zones – Up to speed
Vancouver pianist Paul Plimley and zheng virtuoso Mei Han join improvising musicians in Melbourne, Tokyo, Vienna, New York, Toulouse and San Diego via the internet to explore how music can break the sound barrier. Set against the planetarium’s backdrop of stars, the players will connect through live audio streams that mix music and metaphor. The numerous challenges of this ambitious project (line delays, differences in time zones, and disparate access to technological resources) contrast with the utopian aspirations that fuelled early internet hype and mingle with our belief that music can communicate across boundaries of language and culture.
Two different programs will be presented.
Friday, November 15, 7 PM PST
Engine 27 in New York: Ellery Eskelin
Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo: Akikazu Nakamura
UCSD – CRCA – San Diego: Jason Robinson
Westspace – Melbourne: Robin Fox & Anthony Pateras
Saturday, November 16, 10 AM PST
Toulouse: L’ Quan Ninh
Engine 27 in New York: Ellery Eskelin
Kunstradio & Zeiss Planetarium in Vienna: Mia Zabelka
The Artists
ENGINE 27 in NEW YORK
Ellery Eskelin “Eskelin continues to be the most inventive American tenor player in creative music…” Sparked by his mother “Bobbie Lee” who played Hammond B3 organ professionally, Ellery Eskelin began collaborating with like minded composers and improvisers such as drummer Joey Baron, bassist Mark Helias and Gerry Hemingway in the eighties. He later formed his current working band; including sampler and accordion player Andrea Parkins and drummer Jim Black. Eskelin’s recordings have been named in Best of the Year critics’ polls ranging from the New York Times to DownBeat Magazine and the The Village Voice.
MACHIDA CITY MUSEUM OF GRAPHIC ARTS – TOKYO
Akikazu Nakamura
Tokyo based, Akikazu Nakamura is a traditional shakuhachi teacher and jazz virtuoso. He is a graduate of the NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) School of Traditional Music and the Berklee College of Music in Boston and studied at the New England Conservatory for Graduate Studies of Composition Commissioned by Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Akikazu has toured over thirty countries. He is renowned for his innovative use of circular breathing for shakuhachi, stretching the limits of this ancient instrument in ways that few others have.
UCSD:CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN COMPUTING AND THE ARTS ñSAN DIEGO Jason Robinson
Reedist/improviser/composer Jason Robinson divides his time between a dynamic performance career, teaching activities, organizing efforts, and ethno/musicological research. Based in San Diego, California, Robinson is an active member of the improvised and popular music scene(s) of the West Coast – leading his own “jazz” groups, collaborating in a variety of improvised and experimental contexts, and touring as a sideman with a number of groups.
WESTSPACE – MELBOURNE
Robin Fox & Anthony Pateras Melbourne based Robin Fox & Anthony Pateras take seemingly innocent acoustic sources and transmutate them into visceral textures and gestures through a chaotic improvisational language and realtime processing. Known for assaulting pianos in various states of preparation and disintegration, music boxes and their voices via contact mics, mac and vintage analogue technology, their sound ranges from nondescript crunchiness to post-apocalyptic clarity. Their latest piece Circuits & Glass was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
TOULOUSE
L’ Quan Ninh
Based in Toulouse, France composer and improviser L’ Quan Ninh participates regularly in ensembles that mix contemporary acoustic & electroacoustic music, improvisation, ‘performance art’, dance, poetry, experimental cinema, photography and video. He is a member of the percussion ensemble Quatuor H’lios, whose repertoire includes original works that mix percussion and new technology. Ninh previously performed with Quatuor H’lios at the Western Front as part of the 1997 Electronic Arts Festival.
KUNSTRADIO & VIENNA PLANETARIUM – VIENNA
Mia Zabelka
Electric violinist, multimedia artist and curator Mia Zabelka lives and works in Vienna. A three-time winner of the Ars Electronica prize (1988, 1993, 1994) and winner of the WDR competition for composition, she makes music with John Zorn, David Moss, Fernando Grillo, Eliot Sharp, Wolfgang Mitterer, Fred Frith and Joe Zawinul as well as working with the DJs Gerhard Potuznig, Robin Rimbaud and Electric Indigo, amongst others. Zabelka plays an electric violin from ZETA-Systems.
H.R. MACMILLAN PLANETARIUM – VANCOUVER
Paul Plimley Vancouver-based Paul Plimley is a pianist/composer/improviser active nationally and internationally for the past 24 years. His music is the result of playing, studying and receiving inspiration from European classical music (continuing through the 20th century), and the entire scope of American music (Jazz, blues, 50’s through 70’s pop, etc. ). He has toured many times throughout Europe, Canada and the United States. In 1995 he received the Freddie Stone Award and his CD ROM portion of Everything In Stages has won major multimedia awards in Canada, the United States and Europe.
Mei Han
Recognized internationally as one of the world’s leading virtuosi and authorities on the zheng, she has also explored her instrument in a contemporary experimental aesthetic that parallels ancient Chinese musical traditions. Mei holds two masters degrees in ethnomusicology, from the Musical Research Institute of the Chinese Arts Academy in Beijing and from the University of British Columbia. She has also written numerous articles on Chinese instrumental and Minority music as well as the zheng entry for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the world’s premiere reference book on music.
Contact: DB Boyko Tel: 604-876-9343
Voice: 604-878-7448
Email: newmusic@front.bc.ca
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the H.R. MacMillan Planetarium, Canada Council for the Arts, Heritage Canada, Coastal Jazz & Blues Society, THE THING – www.thing.net and all of our international partners
MEI HAN & PAUL PLIMLEY