Cornet and Vocals
Violin and Vocals
Percussion
Live-electronics and Vocals
Piano
Double Bass
Violoncello and Vocals
Composer and cornetist Ben LaMar Gay has found a form of creative expression that begins with improvisation and expands beyond the limits of any single genre. For this performance at the Pierre Boulez Saal, which is part of his ongoing work-in-progress The Manipulations of Lines and Breff, he presents a new ensemble comprised of his international family of collaborators.
“Growing up on Chicago’s South Side allowed me to witness many ceremonial processions towards our freshwater inland sea, Lake Michigan. At our Great Lake, generations of improvisers, poets, swimmers, storytellers, and grill masters have been called by the openness that the waterside provides. The water calls to them, it calls to me, it calls to all of us who witness it. My affection for songs inspired by ‘the water’ spans from fisherman melodies to spirituals to loud House music ‘mash-ups’ in a beach parking lot. It often felt that the offerings of sound to the water were made in exchange for the sense of openness against the grid. I love when a ‘mash-up’ sounds like water.”
—Ben LaMar Gay
Set 1: The Beauty of Secrets
The program’s first set features the ensemble in mixed groupings performing a collection of improvised systems based on the beauty of secrets.
Set 2: Água Futurism (Extended)
The second set marks the world premiere of Água Futurism (Extended), a new work commissioned by the Pierre Boulez Saal and inspired by Great Lake sonic rituals and the connection to water.
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Chicago-born Ben LaMar Gay is a composer and cornetist who uses sound, color, space, and folkloric influences to create electro-acoustic collages, exploring and expanding on the term “Americana.” He holds a bachelor’s degree in Music Education from Northeastern Illinois University and has served as a music instructor in Chicago Public Schools, a guest lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and worked with the Chicago Park District’s Inferno Mobile Recording Studio for several years. He has also spent a three-year residency in Brazil. His collaborators have included Joshua Abrams, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Bixiga 70, the Black Monks of Mississippi, Celso Fonseca, George Lewis, Nicole Mitchell, Jeff Parker, Theo Parrish, Mike Reed, Tomeka Reid, and Itiberê Zwarg., among many others. He released his debut album, Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun, in 2018 and has been artist in residence with the Edgar Miller Legacy Glasner Studio and the Red Bull Music Academy. Performances have taken him across the U.S. and to France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the Netherlands. |
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Macie Stewart is a Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, songwriter, and improviser who primarily works with piano, violin, voice, and guitar. She made her solo debut with the project Mouth Full of Glass in 2021 and has since created the full-length sound installations Hisako’s House, a site-specific multimedia piece involving dance, visuals, and music with choreographer Robyn Mineko Williams, and The World Doubles in Size, a quadraphonic sound installation through Experimental Sound Studio at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Conservatory. She is a founding member of the band Finom, which has been touring internationally since 2016, has released four albums, and created the multi-media theater performance Full Bush. |
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Multidisciplinary artist Mikel Patrick Avery is a jazz drummer recognized for his style that often involves the use of unconventional “non-musical” objects. He is also a filmmaker, composer, photographer, designer, instrument builder, and educator. In recent years, he has performed with a variety of ensembles and artists, including Joshua Abrams’s Natural Information Society, Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, Theaster Gates’s Black Monks of Mississippi, and Tomeka Reid, as well as leading his own projects. His work has been seen and heard at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Kennedy Center, New York’s New Museum, Art Basel (Switzerland), the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and Germany’s documenta, among many others. |
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The work of composer, electronics performer, and sound artist Sam Pluta is focused on the computer as a performance instrument capable of sharing the stage with artists of many different backgrounds, from new-music ensembles to world-class improvisers, creating interaction between instrumental performers and reactive computerized sound worlds. He is co-director of the New York–based collective Wet Ink Ensemble and has received commissions from organizations including the Lucerne Festival and the Warsaw Autumn Festival. He has performed with the Peter Evans Ensemble, Rocket Science, and PANG!, among many other groups. |
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Trained as a classical pianist, Sophie Agnel took an interest in modern jazz early on and has been working with free improvisation for more than three decades. Inspired by the prepared-piano techniques of John Cage, she has transformed her instrument into a sort of “extended piano,” creating a personal musical universe that is by turns lyrical, abstract, and sensualist. Her collaborators have included artists such as Michel Doneda, Daunik Lazro, Olivier Benoit, Catherine Jauniaux, Roger Turner, Phil Minton, Josef Nadj, and Henri Jules Julien. Together with instrument maker Laurent Paquier and the Centre National de Création Musicale d’Albi-Tarn she has developed the “nOpianO/cordophone,” an experimental electro-acoustic instrument.
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French-German bassist and composer Pascal Niggenkemper trained at the Cologne Musikhochschule and at New York’s Manhattan School of Music. His work blurs the line between improvised music, pure sound, and experimental music with a distinct artistic language infused with new bass techniques. He has performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Vision Festival in New York, the Umbrella Music Festival in Chicago, and at many other venues across Europe and the U.S. He is currently artist in residence at Jazzdor in Strasbourg. |
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Experimental sound artist and activist Olula Negre is a cellist, improviser, composer, and visual artist whose work is rooted in their Black American and Latine heritage, queerness, and their interests in speculative fiction/storytelling, folk music, labor movements, and cosmic workings. Negre is a co-curator of AfriClassical Futures, a music and conversation series at Elastic Arts in Chicago featuring Black diasporic musicians working in, around, or influenced by classical traditions, and one half of ¡Bananaquit!, an electro-acoustic duo with bassist Torstein Johansen. |
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