tete-a-tete

Please join International House Philadelphia and Ars Nova Workshop

for tete-a-tete, a new series of unique improvised music duets.

Co-presented by Ars Nova Workshop

Because of their ability to produce such radically disparate sounds within a single performance, the duo format has become one of the most intriguing and engaging settings to explore sound, space, stamina and rigor for both artist and audience. The musicians in this series are among the leading figures in the worlds of jazz, experimental and contemporary music. tete-a-tete showcases a cross section of the past 40 years of groundbreaking and exploratory music in new and unique settings, making these rare Philadelphia appearances very special.

Saturday, October 25 at 8pm

Paul Bley + Richard Poole

In the final reckoning, the pianist Paul Bley’s influence over the last 50 years of jazz – and it continues – will be enormous... Mr Bley’s music runs on a mixture of deep historical knowledge and its own inviolable principles. - Ben Ratliff, The New York Times

Paul Bley (born in Montreal, 1932) is one of the most influential pianists in the entire history of jazz. In his twenties, Bley performed with Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Chet Baker and many others. At 21, he made his first album as a leader for Charles Mingus’ Debut label, with Mingus himself on bass and Art Blakey on drums. Briefly based in California in the late 1950s, his 1958 quintet introduced the talents of Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins to the jazz world. As a member of the Jimmy Giuffre Trio and with his own groups, Bley brought chamber music clarity into the new domain of free jazz.

A founding member of the Jazz Composers Guild, from which the Jazz Composers Orchestra would subsequently evolve, Bley was also one of the first artists to appear on ECM. Through the 1970s, he devoted his energies to his own label IAI, including the first-ever recordings of Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorius as members of his quartet. In the 1980s, Bley returned to ECM and toured the world in a new quartet with Bill Frisell, John Surman and Paul Motian. In 2001, The National Library of Canada purchased Paul Bley’s vast archive of tapes and documents and established the Paul Bley Fonds, an important historical resource for jazz scholars.

For this very rare Philadelphia appearance, he is joined by Boston-based percussionist Richard Poole. Poole last played with Paul Bley in Berlin in 1989 at the Berlin Museum of Fine Arts. Originally from Milo, Maine, he has performed primarily on the East Coast with musicians such as Filp Phillips, Jaco Pastorius, George Garzone, Jay Corey, Lowell Davidson and Ira Sullivan. His most recent CD, "Opposite Voltage" features Jeff Palmer and George Garzone.

Sunday, December 14 at 8pm

Steve Reid + Kieran Hebden

Percussionist Steve Reid first recorded with Motown’s Martha & Vandella’s at age 17, working in the Apollo Theatre house band under the direction of Quincy Jones. Reid relocated to Africa for many years, performing with various African bands such as Guy Warren, Fela Kuti, Alpha Jazz Band and Leone Starrs. Reid has performed and recorded with an overwhelming array of exceptional jazz and R & B artists including Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, Dionne Warwick, T-Bone Walker, Archie Shepp, Dexter Gordon, James Brown, Martha Reeves, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Sam Rivers, Peggy Lee, Fats Domino, Henry Threadgill, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, among many others.

 

Best known for his post-rock band Fridge and as the sole member of Four Tet, Kieran Hebden's abstract work incorporates elements of hip hop, electronica, techno, jazz and folk music with live instrumentation, balancing organic and programmed sounds. His first full-length was 1999's Dialogue, which was noticed by experimental dub pioneer Pole (Stefan Betke), which led to their collaboration. Alongside recording his own material, Hebden has also performed remixes for a number of artists including Aphex Twin, Radiohead, Battles, Steve Reich and Black Sabbath.

Saturday, January 31 at 8pm

Mats Gustafsson + Thurston Moore

with members + subscribers pre-concert reception

Mats is the most modern of players where the genre tags of jazz, noise, experimental, avant-whatever are finally transcended to a new millennium – where compositional concepts are at once in check with open improvisation and a supermodernism that we always wanted: rock & roll. - Thurston Moore

Sweden’s Mats Gustafsson is one of the world's biggest names on the free music scene. His extended saxophone techniques draw equally from the fiery free jazz blowing tradition as well as the European microtonal schools, reinventing the playing of the instrument along the way. Through groups such as The Thing (with Paal Nilssen-Love), Sonore (with Ken Vandermark), Peter Brotzmann’s Chicago Tentet, Barry Guy New Orchestra, Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz Orchestra, Original Silence (with Thurston Moore, Terrie Ex, Jim O’Rourke and Massimo Zu) and collaborations with Sonic Youth, Joe McPhee and The Boredoms, Gustafsson is one of the most powerful saxophonists working today.

Guitarist Thurston Moore, a member of the critically-acclaimed art/punk rock band Sonic Youth, has been involved in numerous experimental side projects – from composing for the Bang on a Can All-Stars to collaborating with Cecil Taylor. Along with carrying Sonic Youth into the 2000s, Moore has performed with scores of exceptional underground musicians including DJ Spooky, Lydia Lunch, William Hooker, Christian Marclay, Mike Watt, Chris Corsano, Nels Cline and Glenn Branca.

Sunday, April 26 at 8pm

Tony Conrad + Keiji Haino

A pioneering force behind the evolution of minimalism, violinist and composer Tony Conrad introduced the idea of "Eternal Music," a droning, mesmerizing performance idiom which employed long durations, amplification and precise pitch to explore new worlds of sound. Through both his solo work and through collaborations with artists including LaMonte Young, John Cale and Faust, he forged new creative directions which proved enormously influential on successive generations of artists ranging in background from pop to the avant-garde. Born in Baltimore in 1940, Conrad studied music at Harvard, where he was exposed to the work of John Cage and David Tudor. Among his fellow students were David Behrman, Christian Wolff and Frederic Rzewski, who also pursued careers in experimental music.

Conrad relocated to New York after graduating in 1962, and became immersed in the city's burgeoning underground music scene. There he first joined forces with composer and saxophonist LaMonte Young, who at the time was leading an improvisational group including wife Marian Zazeela on voice-drone, Billy Name (later a staple of Andy Warhol's Factory scene) on guitar and Angus MacLise on percussion. Conrad approached Young about performing with the group, and by 1963 a new line-up also consisting of Zazeela and the young Welsh musician John Cale began playing in an ensemble variously dubbed the Dream Syndicate and the Theater of Eternal Music. Sustaining notes for hours at a time, their improvised dissections of specific harmonic intervals rejected the compositional process, instead elaborating shared performance concepts. The Dream Syndicate disbanded in 1965, with Conrad, Young and Cale all later staking claim to authoring of the "Eternal Music" aesthetic; Young also held on to the group's live tapes. Conrad and Cale continued collaborating, joining young Pickwick company songwriter Lou Reed and sculptor Walter de Maria in a rock band called the Primitives. Conrad also proved a key contributor to early Velvet Underground lore by giving Reed the S&M book from which the band derived its name.

Keiji Haino, born 1952 in Chiba, Japan, and currently residing in Tokyo, is a mysterious Japanese musician whose work has included rock, free improvisation, noise, singer-songwriter, solo percussion, psychedelic, minimalism and drone styles. Incredibly prolific, he headed dozens of bands and released hundreds of CDs on a variety of labels around the globe. Active since the 1970s, he has collaborated with composer Toru Takemitsu, Faust, Rashied Ali, Derek Bailey, Joey Baron, Peter Brotzmann, Lee Konitz, Bill Laswell and John Zorn, among many others. 

Haino cites a broad range of influences, including troubadour and medieval music, Marlene Dietrich, Iannis Xenakis, Syd Barrett and Charlie Parker. He has a long love affair with early blues music, particularly the works of Blind Lemon Jefferson, and is heavily inspired by the Japanese musical concept of 'Ma', the silent spaces in music. Haino is known for intensely cathartic sound explorations, and despite the fact that much of his work contains thematic or musical similarities, his output has been so varied as to not always be recognizable as him. 

Haino's initial artistic outlet was theater, inspired by the radical writings of Antonin Artaud. After brief stints in a number of blues and experimental outfits, he formed improvising ensemble Lost Aaraaf in 1970 and later founded many of the seminal Japanese experimental ensembles such as Fushitsusha, Aihiyo, Sanhedolin and Nijiumu, and with collaborations with the critically-acclaimed Japanese duo The Ruins. 

tete-a-tete has been funded by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, through the Philadelphia Music Project.

We also thank the Sheraton University City and WRTI for their support.