Tag: JEAN CARLA RODEA

Darius Jones: For The People

Darius Jones: For The People
Monday, November 5, 2018
Performance 8pm / Doors 7pm

What: Part concert and part community event, For the People, organized by Darius Jones in collaboration with The Wet Ink Large Ensemble brings together musicians and activists on the eve of the upcoming midterm election.
When: Monday, November 5, 2018
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $18 presale, $25 Doors
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: http://bit.ly/FA181105

Brooklyn, NYFor the People is a community-based event and concert organized by Darius Jones on the eve of the November midterm election. The evening is centered around a collection of compositions by Jones—in collaboration with The Wet Ink Large Ensemble—that uphold the belief that artists have the duty and power to inform, inspire, and empower their community. The evening includes the world premiere of Being Caged In ICE, followed by the second performance ever of America The Joke, and concludes with the return of LawNOrder (pronounced “law no order”), a game piece examining social justice and American History in which each player represents a separate character and is handed a law to follow at the beginning of the piece. Onnesha Roychoudhuri, Brooklyn-based activist, editor, educator, and author of The Marginalized Majority: Claiming Our Power in a Post-Truth America to speak.

Appearances by:
Eric Wubbels: piano
Ian Antonio: percussion
Josh Modney: violin
Weston Olencki: trombone
Amirtha Kidambi: voice
Gelsey Bell: voice
Nina Dante: voice
Sugar Vendil: piano
Sean Conly: bass
Michael Vatcher: drums
Daniel Givens: electronics
Jean Carla Rodea: voice
Shelley Nicole: voice
Jonathan Finlayson: trumpet
Leia Slosberg: flute
Jessica Jones: tenor sax
Sam Newsome: soprano sax

For more information about this project visit votefordarius.com.

Darius Jones is a critically acclaimed alto saxophonist and composer. In 2008, Jones was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship by Roulette, which he used to launch the Elizabeth-Caroline Unit, a project dedicated to new works for voice. Roulette continued to support Jones’ work through a Jerome Foundation Commission, awarding Jones an Artist-in-Residence opportunity for the Elizabeth-Caroline Unit to premiere his vocal composition, The Oversoul Manual, in2014. Jones made his compositional debut at Carnegie Hall with The Oversoul Manual in October 2014. In 2013, Jones was nominated for Alto Saxophonist of the Year, and for Up & Coming Artist of the Year two years in a row by the Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards. He was one of Jazz Times’ Debut Artists of the Year for 2009, and his 2012 release, Book of Mæ’bul (Another Kind of Sunrise), was listed among NPR’s Best Top 10 Jazz Albums of that year.

[RESIDENCY] Amirtha Kidambi: Lines of Light

What: The composer/vocalist Amirtha Kidambi channels centuries of vocal tradition through electronics and structured improvisation
with inspired, virtuosic collaborators.
When: June 17, 2018. 8pm.
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $20 Door, $15 Presale
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: bit.ly/SP180617

Brooklyn, NY – Virtuosic composer/vocalist Amirtha Kidambi continues her 2018 residency with Roulette to present the world premiere of Lines of Light. The piece is inspired by the title of the late Muhal Richard Abrams’s Levels and Degrees of Light and medieval composer Hildegard von Bingen’s reference to her vision of God as “The Shade of the Living Light” and brings together a group of female vocal powerhouses. Featuring Jean Carla Rodea, Anaïs Maviel, Emilie Lesbros, and Charmaine Lee, the quartet is a structured improvisation, intended to allow each vocalist to exercise maximum creativity within the larger framework of the piece. Following the Inauguration of Donald Trump, Kidambi assembled the group to freely improvise in order to form community with female musicians from diverse backgrounds in a time of extreme vulnerability and uncertainty. Developed out of Kidambi’s long-term vision to elevate vocalists within experimental music, as they have been historically marginalized due, in part, to the gendered nature of jazz and the avant-garde, Lines of Light showcases the increasingly high caliber of vocalists currently working in New York. The resident artist will also present a new improvised duo with Lea Bertucci on analog electronics. In the duo, Bertucci manipulates Kidambi’s voice through tactile methods with analog tape machine, by pressing on the reels and physically touching the tape. Kidambi reacts in turn with a vocal arsenal of timbral techniques, creating a literal visceral feedback loop of noise, processed, and amplified voice.

Amirtha Kidambi is invested in the creation and performance of subversive music, from free improvisation and avant-jazz, to experimental bands and new music. She is the creative force behind the band Elder Ones, as well as a key collaborator in Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl, duo with Darius Jones and his groups Elizabeth-Caroline Unit and Samesoul Maker, Maria Grand’s DiaTribe, various groups with William Parker, Charlie Looker’s Seaven Teares and Pat Spadine’s Ashcan Orchestra. As an improviser, she has played with Matana Roberts, Tyshawn Sorey, Ingrid Laubrock, Ava Mendoza, Trevor Dunn, Ben Vida, Tyondai Braxton, and Shahzad Ismaily. Kidambi worked closely with composer Robert Ashley until the end of his life and had the honor of working with Muhal Richard Abrams for the premiere of Dialogue Social. She has performed nationally and internationally in Europe and Asia, with Elder Ones and solo in collaborative formations for the Whitney Biennial, Carnegie Hall, Newport Jazz Festival, Berliner Festspiele (Germany), Festival Jazz Jantar (Poland), Borderline Festival (Greece), Bimhuis (Amsterdam), and Music Unlimited (Austria).

Lines of Light
Jean Carla Rodea
Anaïs Maviel
Emilie Lesbros
Charmaine Lee
Amirtha Kidambi

Amirtha Kidambi/Lea Bertucci Duo
Amirtha Kidambi – Voice
Lea Bertucci – Analog Electronics

Spotlight On: Cecilia Lopez


Cecilia Lopez: machinic fantasies
Tuesday, May 8, 2018 @ 8:00 pm

Tell us about yourself and what you do.

I am a composer, musician and multimedia artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. I’ve been living around. New York for the past three years, studying and working on different music and installation projects. My work often explores the physical and perceptual matters of sound through a variety of mediums like composition, objects, video or combinations of them. I also play piano and different synthesizers. I sometimes write songs. I sometimes sing. I used to play in a band, which is called Vigilante Margarita. I am the third of three siblings. I have a black cat named Igor that lives in Buenos Aires.

Describe the project you are developing for Roulette.

The project is based on past explorations that I did around a revolving sound sculpture that functions as a live “mediation machine.” I think of it as a performative installation because it’s presented as a composed space where certain multichannel video and sound techniques are used to play with concepts like immersion, meditation and synchronicity, but it’s also a musical work composed to follow a timeline. The objects in question are like artisanal filter machines made with revolving oil drums. The barrels have a speaker inside that plays music or sound, which is filtered by their spinning as the sculpture is moved by hand. This explanation might sound very complicated but in fact the perceptual principles behind the piece are very simple. I am interested in questioning ideas of content, transmission and the oppositions between object/subject and form/structure. I would say that it’s sort of an industrial or lo-fi science fiction fantasy (à la Raymond Roussel) that plays with very primitive principles of sound an image.

What is your first musical memory?

I can’t really say what my first musical memory was, but I can say that I spent endless hours the first seven years of my life on a swing that my parents have installed in our house’s attic, listening to the radio and singing along with an old cassette player.

What is influencing your work right now?

I work a lot with processes for filtering either sound or visual content. In that way my work is very

permeable. Many things that have been influential for me have ended up becoming material for some of my works. That goes for music, sound recordings from specific places, literature, the world that surrounds me, etc. What is interesting to me about this way of working is that abstract ideas about our perception of sound can be put in conversation or in opposition with more narrative or conceptual ideas that I feel are important.

What is your favorite place to buy records?

Despite the current trend, I really don’t buy records. I don’t own a record player and

in the last few years, my nomadic life has caused me to avoid accumulating stuff… So I am totally out of the vinyl fetishist loop. That said, I can answer the question by describing my extremely modest record collection: Eliane Radigue, Feedback Works; Wendy Carlos, Switch-on Brandenburgs; Anthony Braxton Duets with Muhal Richard Abrams, and a Spanish-language soundtrack from the TV show “Speed Racer.”

What’s your absolute favorite place in the city to be and why?

Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia. You know, there is something about that place… also that was my first connection with New York since I met Phill before coming here. It’s been one of the most interesting, familiar and friendly places that I can think of in this hectic landscape.

Describe your performance at Roulette in three words.

Precarious augmented reality