Saturday, April 24
3pm CT
Streaming on Twitch
FREE, $5+ suggested donation (100% goes to the artists)
In the beginning was free music. And a taste for adventure. If you've ever wondered how a team of improvising musicians actually manage to stabilize themselves, even though they've decided to work in instability, Sangliers is waiting for you. An international quintet that dedicates itself to free, total and collective improvisation, and that has very serious reasons to do so. One of them is that Keefe Jackson, Dave Rempis, Christine Wodraska, Didier Lasserre and Peter Orins have answered the call of The Bridge, a transatlantic network that brings together improvisers from Chicago and France, in ensembles that are always mixed, always hybrid, always phenomenal. Another reason, not the least, is that for these five musicians improvisation is a method and a philosophy. When music is strictly the result of direct actions, reactions and interactions (interferences) between the players, without the mediation of a leader (an authority), a score or a structure (a law), only the forces in presence and the collective creation, always fluctuating, to which they end up incessantly according to their transactions in situ and in real time, count. Here and now. The internal functioning, the functional agility, of such a group of individuals, at the same time mobile, tactical and operational, certainly has political resonances, evoking for example the concept of swarm intelligence put forward by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
Sangliers (The Bridge #14) were scheduled to tour Chicago and the Midwest in the Spring of 2021, after traveling through France in 2018 (where they recorded a CD mixed and mastered by ESS, and available on The Bridge Sessions label). We'll finally have to wait until Spring 2022 to hear them live, all together. But until then, right at the scheduled tour moment, Sangliers will subdivide as part of the Quarantine Concerts at ESS, each temporarily in their own area: Keefe Jackson and Dave Rempis from Chicago, Peter Orins from Lille (with other Bridge members: Sakina Abdou and Jean-Luc Guionnet on saxophones, Christian Pruvost on trumpet) will send sounds, vibrations, and waves to each other, and to you. Meet them in the middle of this invisible bridge.
Three days after this event, and linked to it, to the conditions in which creative music can be heard today, The Bridge and the University of Chicago Center in Paris organize a Zoom webinar on Tuesday April 27, 2021. At 11:00 am (Chicago Time) - 6:00 pm (Paris Time). Yves Citton (Université de Paris 8), Travis Jackson (University of Chicago), George E. Lewis (Columbia University), Nicole Mitchell (University of Pittsburgh), Yannick Séité (Université de Tours), and the one and only Joëlle Léandre will explore the notions of « Circulation, Improvisation and Attention » in the context of today Covid pandemic and in relation to the field of creative Music.