Results tagged “davidlang”

Innovative, thoughtful programming and unorthodox venues were hallmarks of Anaphora's inaugural season, and it looks like they'll be picking up where they left off with tomorrow night's opener of their Contemporary Series at the Jazz Showcase. The concert will highlight a recent contemporary music trend of incorporating jazz in more sophisticated ways. Many of the early attempts to combine the two genres treated jazz as a novelty - an orchestra playing swing eighth notes, say - but now the fusion is becoming more organic and less overt, due in large part to a shrinking music world that allows composers to be exposed to and influenced by a wider variety of sources. Augusta Reed Thomas, the former Chicago Symphony Orchestra Composer-in-Residence whose “D(i)agon(als)” for solo clarinet will be performed Tuesday, described this new approach:

It is clear, in all my works, that I have been listening to jazz for 30 years. I am not a composer who does empty-headed "cross-over" jazz pieces where the jazz bits make all the jazzer's blush with embarrassment.... rather, there is a deeply integrated and digested set of references and perfumes which can be sensed.