Roswell Rudd & Mark Dresser / Wildflowers: Adam Rudolph & Oguri (8pm)

Roswell Rudd, Trombone
Mark Dresser, Bass
Wildflowers: Adam Rudolph, Hand Drums & Percussion; Oguri, Butoh Dance

Please join us for an evening of exceptional duos. First, listen to what happens when two generations of improvised music meet, with the seminal trombonist/composer Roswell Rudd and the innovative bassist Mark Dresser. This duo was formed a few years ago at an informal rehearsal, resulting in a new CD, AirWalkers, with music that is full of spontaneous invention. Wildflowers, the longstanding duo of jazz & world music drummer/composer Adam Rudolph and Japanese Butoh dancer Oguri, comes from Los Angeles for it’s New York debut. Each performance, created entirely in the moment, is a journey into the darkness of Butoh and the dialogue of percussive dynamics and motion.

Originally from Chicago, composer and handrummer/percussionist Adam Rudolph has been hailed as “a pioneer in world music” by the New York Times and “a master percussionist” by Musician magazine. For the past three decades Rudolph has appeared at festivals and concerts throughout North & South America, Europe, Africa, and Japan,
In 1988 Rudolph began his association with the legendary Yusef Lateef, which lasts to this day. He has recorded 14 albums with Dr. Lateef including their large ensemble collaborations: “The World at Peace” (1995), “Beyond the Sky” (2000) and 2003’s “In The Garden” with Rudolph conducting his Go: Organic Orchestra. He has performed worldwide with Dr. Lateef in ensembles ranging from their acclaimed duo concerts to appearing as guest soloist with Koln, Atlanta and Detroit symphony orchestras. Since the 1970’s Rudolph has been developing his unique syncretic approach to hand drums in creative collaborations with many masters of cross-cultural and improvised music such as Sam Rivers, Pharaoh Sanders, L. Shankar, and Fred Anderson. He is known especially for his innovative duo collaborations with Don Cherry, Jon Hassel, Wadada Leo Smith, and Omar Sosa. In 1992 Rudolph created his own performing ensemble, Adam Rudolph’s Moving Pictures as a vehicle to explore his compositional concepts. The group has performed in both Europe and the United States and has released several CD’s featuring Rudolph’s compositions. In October 2006, his Moving Pictures Quartet, featuring Hamid Drake, Ralph Jones and Joseph Bowie, toured Scandinavia including a performance at the Tampere Jazz Festival in Finland. Rudolph’s new Moving Pictures Octet toured the East Coast in November 2006, including a performance at New York’s Symphony Space, before recording a new CD set for January 2008 release on Justin Time Records. In 2001 Rudolph founded Go: Organic Orchestra a 20-30-piece woodwind, strings and percussion ensemble dedicated to developing his compositional and rhythm concepts in a large group format. In concert, Rudolph improvisationally conducts the ensemble using his own innovative process. The group has recorded four CDs to date. For the past twelve years Rudolph has performed as half of the Wildflowers Duo with Butoh dancer innovator, Oguri. He also tours internationally with his trio Hu: Vibrational featuring Hamid Drake and Brahim Fribgane. They have released three CDs to date, and have just returned from a tour of Japan. Adam Rudolph is known as one the early innovators in what is now called “World Music”. In 1977 he co-founded, with Gambian Kora Griot Foday Musa Suso, The Mandingo Griot Society,one of the first bands to combine African and American music. In 1988, he recorded the first fusion of American and Gnawa (Moroccan) music with the Gnawa Sintir player and singer Hassan Hakmoun.
In 1990 he was commissioned by the LA Festival to create and lead Vashti Percussion Ensemble with percussionist masters from Bali, Iran, India, Lebanon and Java. The ensemble still performs annually. In the 1980’s, under the auspices of World Music Institute Rudolph was artistic director of the annual concert event “World of Percussion” In 1995 he premiered The Dreamer, an Opera based on Friedreich Nietzsche’s “Birth of Tragedy”. From 1998 to 2001 and in 2005 Rudolph performed at the Festival D’Essaouira in Morocco in collaboration with many leading Gnawa Maleems (masters). For 2 of those years he was artistic director and curator of “Calling Across the Water” an acoustic collaboration between American, Bambara and Gnawa musicians at that festival. Active as a performer in the Los Angeles creative music scene since 1979, Rudolph has also contributed by producing concerts and running his own Meta Records label. In 1998 he organized the three-day Bootstrap Festival, Los Angeles, presenting over 75 artists from many local and national cultural backgrounds. From 1992 -97 he organized and performed a free weekly concert series of improvised music for children at the Jazz Bakery which featured guitarist Kevin Eubanks and Ralph Jones. He has received grants and compositional commissions from the Rockefeller Foundation, Meet the Composer, Mary Flagler Cary Trust, the NEA, Arts International, the Durfee Foundation, Phaedrus Foundation and American Composers Forum. In June of 2007 Rudolph received a “New Works” grant from Chamber Music America to compose for his Moving Pictures Octet. Adam Rudolph’s website is: www.metarecords.com.

Oguri, a native of Japan, studied radical visual arts, which led to his career as a performer and dancer. He studied with Tatsumi Hijikata, the creator/inventor of Butoh dance. He joined famed dancer Min Tanaka’s company, Mai-Juku, in 1985. For five years Oguri lived, worked, and helped establish Tanaka’s farm outside of Tokyo.

A resident of Southern California since 1990 he conducts Body Weather Laboratory. Oguri received the Irvine Fellowship in Dance for the research and development of Height of Sky, a site-specific dance project that took place in the deserts of Joshua Tree. It was an investigation of the relationship between dancer and environment, and explored the development of his identity as a Japanese dancer in America. Oguri received the Dance: Creation to Performance grants from The James Irvine Foundation and administered by Dance/USA for his William Faulkner Project “Caddy! Caddy! Caddy!”