Charlotte Street is pleased to host Sycamore House, a series of performances presented and curated by Kansas City composer and musician, Shawn Hansen. This May 4th showcase is the third in the series and features performances by local and out of town artists. For this spring installment of the Sycamore House Series, the focus is on improvisation. The spirit of improvisation is a part of all music making and creative endeavors. The Sycamore House Series strives to support improvisation across all genres. This spring show celebrates improvised music in one of its purest forms. The collaboration of out-of-town percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani and saxophonist Michael Doneda focuses on exploration of sound and the pulse while not adhering to conventional rhythms and song structures. A different way of organizing sound comes out in every performance while still searching for and challenging what we see, hear, and describe as beautiful.
Date: Saturday, May 4, 2013
Time: Doors open at 8pm, show starts at 9pm
Venue: Paragraph / 23 East 12th St. KCMO 64105
Tickets: $8 suggested donation
Featured Artists:
Out of Town – Tatsuya Nakatani, percussionist; and Michael Dondea, saxophonist
ABOUT TATSUYA NAKATANI
Tatsuya Nakatani is a creative percussionist originally from Osaka, Japan. He has been residing in the USA since 1994 and is currently based in Easton, PA. Since the late 1990s, Mr. Nakatani has released over sixty recordings in the USA and Europe and has performed countless solo percussion concerts through intensive touring.
Nakatani’s approach to music is visceral, non-linear and intuitively primitive, expressing an unusually strong spirit while avoiding any categorization. He creates sound via both traditional and extended percussion techniques, utilizing drums, bowed gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, metal objects and bells, as well as various sticks, kitchen tools and homemade bows, all of which manifest in an intense and organic music that represents a very personal sonic world. His approach is steeped in the sensibilities of free improvisation, experimental music, jazz, rock, and noise, and yet retains the sense of space and quiet beauty found in traditional Japanese folk music. His percussion instruments can imitate the sounds of a trumpet, a stringed instrument or an electronic device to the extent that it becomes difficult to recognize the source of the sound. He has devoted himself to a musical aesthetic where rhythm gives way to pulse, often in a way that is not always audible or visible, in currents that incorporate silence and texture. Nakatani’s primary music activities include solo percussion performance, N.G.O. (Nakatani Gong Orchestra) and collaborations with musicians and dancers both in live performance and recordings.
ABOUT MICHAEL DONEDA
Over the years, Michel Doneda (b. 1954) has developed one of the most extensive musical vocabularies in free improvisation. A specialist of the soprano saxophone, he has gradually moved from left-field jazz to the fringes of free improv ever since he began to lead his own sessions in the early ‘80s. His playing can be at turns lyrical, playful, or raucous, and can switch from the liveliness of street melodies to circular breathing, microscopic sounds, or shrieking outbursts. His most frequent recording and performing partners over the years have included singer Beñat Achiary, percussionist Lê Quan Ninh, hurdy-gurdy player Dominique Regef, and bassist Barre Phillips.
ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Over 16 years, Charlotte Street has challenged, nurtured, and empowered thousands of artists, almost $900,000 in awards and grants to artists and their projects, and connected individual artists to each other and to the greater Kansas City community. Charlotte Street – with its community of artists – strives to be a primary catalyst in making Kansas City a vibrant, creative metropolis, alive with collaboration, passion, ideas, and surprise. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org
