Wednesday, April 9th 2008
Truant Runts with Jack Wright and Michael Johnsen
Don Ayler's Psychosis from Oberlin, Ohio
TRUANT RUNTS is Michael Johnsen and Jack Wright, who have been playing together since 2000 and have toured in the US and Europe, sometimes adding French trumpet player, Sebastian Cirotteau. As a duo they have created a CD on the Sprout label by that name.
Jack Wright taught at various universites in the 1960s, and left academia in the early 1970s to engage in radical politics. By the late 1970s he directed his energies into playing the saxophone, which had been his childhood dream. He is today one of a very small group of musicians in North America that has played improvised music exclusively since that time. Through years of near constant touring, often performing for audiences in cities and towns where improvised music had never before been heard, he came to be regarded as an underground legend, the "Johnny Appleseed of Improvised Music". He has deliberately eschewed the conventions and socio-aesthetic limitations of musical careerism to pursue his own vision. Although his de-professionalized approach sets him apart from most musicians at his level of accomplishment, his art has always grown, expanded, and synthesized new information. He is unquestionably an original and virtuosic saxophonist, a master improviser who is deeply lyrical, with humor never far away.
Michael Johnsen was born in 1968 to two German immigrants in Pittsburgh, where he continues to live. Over the past several years he has wired together an melange of analog electronic devices for live performance, whose highly idiosyncratic behaviors are revealed through their complex interactions. As an antidote to all that wire, he is equally devoted to the saw, a simple folk instrument. He is especially fond of putting himself in difficult, confusing situations. Most of what he might have learned has come from the so-called natural world, like watching robins run. "My favorite sound is the one that's over."
DON AYLER'S PSYCHOSIS performs ritualized improvisation. Through wayward stabs at solar divination, the group encourages you to witness absolute presence all of the time.
Don Ayler's Psychosis from Oberlin, Ohio
8pm at The Cat in the Cream Coffeehouse
TRUANT RUNTS is Michael Johnsen and Jack Wright, who have been playing together since 2000 and have toured in the US and Europe, sometimes adding French trumpet player, Sebastian Cirotteau. As a duo they have created a CD on the Sprout label by that name.Jack Wright taught at various universites in the 1960s, and left academia in the early 1970s to engage in radical politics. By the late 1970s he directed his energies into playing the saxophone, which had been his childhood dream. He is today one of a very small group of musicians in North America that has played improvised music exclusively since that time. Through years of near constant touring, often performing for audiences in cities and towns where improvised music had never before been heard, he came to be regarded as an underground legend, the "Johnny Appleseed of Improvised Music". He has deliberately eschewed the conventions and socio-aesthetic limitations of musical careerism to pursue his own vision. Although his de-professionalized approach sets him apart from most musicians at his level of accomplishment, his art has always grown, expanded, and synthesized new information. He is unquestionably an original and virtuosic saxophonist, a master improviser who is deeply lyrical, with humor never far away.
Michael Johnsen was born in 1968 to two German immigrants in Pittsburgh, where he continues to live. Over the past several years he has wired together an melange of analog electronic devices for live performance, whose highly idiosyncratic behaviors are revealed through their complex interactions. As an antidote to all that wire, he is equally devoted to the saw, a simple folk instrument. He is especially fond of putting himself in difficult, confusing situations. Most of what he might have learned has come from the so-called natural world, like watching robins run. "My favorite sound is the one that's over."
DON AYLER'S PSYCHOSIS performs ritualized improvisation. Through wayward stabs at solar divination, the group encourages you to witness absolute presence all of the time.
This entry was posted
on 13 March 2008 at 4:22 PM.
