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The Spektral Quartet, coming to St. Louis in March.
Once again, New Music Circle is bringing crucial sounds to St. Louis with a season full of stimulating aural brain candy and more outreach than ever. New Music Circle has spent decades making and bringing the best of improvisational and experimental music to our city, and the new season kicks off Friday, October 2 at Joe’s Café.
The first show pairs Evan Parker’s far-out solo soprano saxophone wizardry with Peter Evans’ compositional and improvised trumpet work.
Parker has been known as a pioneer from the 1960s onward. He’s noted for his solo work, but has collaborated with other trailblazers like Anthony Braxton and Milford Graves as well as up-and-comers (and past NMC performers) Okkyung Lee and Chris Corsano, in addition to more rock-focused performers like Spiritualized and Scott Walker. New York-based Evans, born in 1981, collaborates with a range of individual artists as well as playing with the Peter Evans Quintet and Zebulon Trio.
After their concert Friday in one of the city’s grooviest off-the-radar venues, they’ll be presenting artists’ talks and short sets in collaboration with local musicians at FOAM on Cherokee Street Saturday morning. About half the season’s artists will provide some kind of outreach beyond just the concert.
“It’s something we’re trying to do more than ever, kind of spend time with our artists here,” says NMC program coordinator Jeremy Kannapell. “It’s always tragic to have artists just come in for a day and then leave.”
Other than Parker and Evans at FOAM, the workshops will take many forms, Kannapell explains. Some will be in art spaces or venues, he says, and some will be much more directly educational, working with schools to reach kids and teenagers, who may never have come in contact with experimental media.
While NMC doesn’t have a venue of its own, Kannapell says being without a home base is an asset.
“The variety of venues allows us to situate the art into a place where it would resonate well,” he says. This season sees shows at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Stage at KDHX, The 560 Music Center and Trinity Lutheran Church.
The church is one of those double-dips Kannapell mentioned. Brussels-based Charlemagne Palestine is the season’s second artist. His first show is Saturday, November 7 at the Pulitzer. Sunday evening, he plays a church organ concert at Trinity.
“We decided to try to maximize his stay here,” Kannapell says. “When the possibility of doing a cathedral set came up, we jumped on it. It’s his preferred venue.”
Palestine is a multi-disciplinary phenomenon, working in film and installation art as well as synthesizers and church bells.
“His approach would lend itself to anybody really interested in music or sound,” Kannapell says. “It comes from the same tradition as religious musics.”
The season continues through the winter and into spring with Silvie Courvoisier (piano) and Mark Feldman (violin) on December 4; Susan Alcorn on the pedal steel guitar and Frank Rosaly on drums January 22; Chicago’s Spektral Quartet March 5; and Australia’s The Necks, March 25 or 26 (TBA).
“I’d hate for anybody to think of us as presenting one type of music or genre,” Kannapell says. “Modern composition, jazz, free jazz, improvised musics, electronic, film and video…we see it as a continuum. The cross-pollination is something we’re totally interested in.”
Check out newmusiccircle.org for more information and to buy tickets.
