A poetic interview and conversation between Spring Curatorial Fellow Carolina Vélez Muñiz and independent curator Juci Reis, on ancestral modes of creating and cultural exchanges. Also available in Spanish and Portuguese.
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News
Interviews, audio, press releases and more content about ESS and the artists we work with.
In this September 2019 conversation with Tim Daisy, Myra Melford talks about taking inspiration from visual art, studying with legendary Chicago pianist Erwin Helfer, and working with improvisation conductor Butch Morris.
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We are thrilled to introduce James Gui as this fall’s ESS Curatorial Fellow, and are eager to present with him a slate of three concerts and accompanying analysis. James is a freelance writer and photographer currently based in Brooklyn interested in the intersection of DIY music culture and resistance of marginalized groups across the globe.
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In this March 2017 interview with Tim Daisy, Chad Taylor talks about practice and performance, transitioning from classical guitar to drums, and his one lesson with mbira master Garikayi Tirikoti.
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Congratulations to Sandra Binion, one of our fiscally sponsored artists, for her upcoming exhibition at Lake Forest College! Full details below, along with a list of accompanying concert performances featuring Carol Genetti, Kioto Aoki, and Katinka Kleijn!
Fleeting and Aftermath are two bodies of work celebrating the fragile and ephemeral experiences that leave profound and lasting emotional imprints.
In this July 2020 conversation with Ken Vandermark, Tashi Dorji talks about moving from Bhutan to the United States, the similarities between punk rock and free improvisation, and his love for Bollywood and traditional monastic music.
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In this November 2015 conversation with Ken Vandermark, Sylvie Courvoisier discusses moving to New York from Switzerland in the late 1990s, the tradeoffs involved in working as a touring musician, and the challenge of finding decent pianos on tour.
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Here is a written interview between the founders of Siga Gana, Filipe Mimoso and Mayara Ferrão, and ESS Spring Curatorial Fellow Carolina Vélez Muñiz. Filipe and Mayara presented an audiovisual set in Carolina’s Quarantine Concert, Vivências.
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Afro-sonorous Brazil is an organic circuit connected to ancestral matrices, which is reinvented through the hybrid relation between body, voice, and instrument. This encounter, independent from a classic structure of Western music, searches for a phenomenological state to manifest creative representations between subjects and their cultural matrices which go beyond the experimental as a primary sense, and which expands towards what could be justified as a collective experience of constructing knowledge.
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In this March 2018 conversation with Ken Vandermark, Kris Davis talks about finding resources for improvisation in the classical tradition, learning by doing "$50 jazz gigs" in New York, and leaving space for other musicians. This episode is sponsored by Astral Spirits Records: “The New Wave of Heavy Free Jazz since September 2014.”
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In this August 2015 conversation with Ken Vandermark, Nate Wooley discusses growing up playing in a big band on the Oregon coast, developing a musical language within technical limitations, aesthetic differences between Chicago and New York music communities, and the challenges of interpreting music by Wynton Marsalis, Anthony Braxton, and Éliane Radigue. This episode is sponsored by Astral Spirits Records: “The New Wave of Heavy Free Jazz since September 2014.”
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Cristian Ospina and Chongotronik are musicians and percussionists who will be performing in Vivências, a concert which I am organizing as part of the 2021 Spring Curatorial Fellowship. The concert looks at how tradition permeates into contemporary life in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, observing how everyday customs influence art. “Vivências” is the Portuguese word for when we vividly and intensely savor moments in our present. The streaming will include visuals by Paulina Leyva.
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