Rhys Chatham Trumpet Trio

Rhys Chatham (trumpet, electronics)
David Daniell (guitar)
Ryan Sawyer (drums)

"While my roots as a trumpet player are coming out of jazz and big band music, my roots as a composer are coming out of post-minimalist and contemporary music and many of these influences find their way into my trumpet playing making it very hard to pin down what style I am playing in." — Rhys Chatham

Avant-garde composer and multi-instrumentalist Rhys Chatham has reached legendary status in experimental music circles.  The Paris-based, New York-born composer began as a classically-trained prodigy, but by 1975, Chatham was fusing the overtone-drenched minimalism of John Cale and Tony Conrad with the relentless, elemental intensity of the Ramones.  He is perhaps best known most recently for high-profile productions of his resplendent symphonies for hundreds of electric guitars, works which certify Chatham's position on the front lines of post-minimalist and contemporary music.

For this concert, Chatham takes up the trumpet and joins forces with guitarist David Daniell and drummer Ryan Sawyer.  Chatham deploys extended playing techniques inherited from bastions of free jazz - Don Cherry, Bill Dixon - as well as leaders of the minimalist movement - Tony Conrad, Jon Hassell, La Monte Young.  Live processing of the instrument through a host of electronic devices gives rise to an ebullient cascade of sound and a truly unique and personal voice, carrying forward Chatham's life-long pursuit of fusing the textural intricacies of the avant-garde with the visceral punch of punk rock.

David Daniell is a Chicago-based guitarist and composer who has collaborated extensively with Rhys Chatham throughout the last four years, including the 2006 Die Donnergötter tour, 2007 Guitar Trio tour, and as Concertmaster for Rhys' 100- and 200-guitar ensemble performances.  He has worked for fifteen years as a member of the improvising blues-drone trio San Agustin and with many other collaborators including Loren Connors, Tim Barnes, Jeph Jerman, Thurston Moore, Tomas Korber, Greg Davis and Jonathan Kane.  Current active collaborations include a duo with Douglas McCombs (Brokeback, Tortoise), a trio with Christian Fennesz and Tony Buck (The Necks), and the quartet Apiary with Steven Hess (Pan American, Haptic, On), Jason Stein (Locksmith Isidore) and Joseph Clayton Mills (Haptic).
www.daviddaniell.com

Ryan Sawyer is a Texas-born, New York-based drummer who has performed and recorded with many improvisers and bands, including Charles Gayle, Thurston Moore, Tony Malaby,  Josephine Foster, C. Spencer Yeh, Nate Wooley, Lee Renaldo, Trevor Dunn, TV on the Radio, Celebration, Jandek, and Rhys Chatham - particularly as the sole percussionist for Chatham's 2009 performance of A Crimson Grail for 200 Guitars at the Lincoln Center.  Sawyer also maintains a number of his own bands and projects - Tall Firs, Glass Rock, Stars Like Fleas, Lone Wolf & Cub, etc - and he led and co-composed the 2008 New York staging of The Boredoms' 88 Boadrum, an 88-minute composition for 88 drummers.

Rhys Chatham is a composer, guitarist and trumpet player from Manhattan. He came under the musical influence of his father, Price, a harpsichordist, and became a devotee of the work of early music composers, playing their music on a virginal. Switching to baroque and Boehm flute, he soon became interested in contemporary music and began playing the work of Edgard Varèse, Luciano Berio, Stefan Wolpe, Mario Davidovsky, and Pierre Boulez.

He began studying counterpoint and harmony at the age of 13. While at NYU, Chatham met Morton Subotnick, who encouraged him to compose electronic music. Working under Subotnick's guidance at the NYU Composer's Workshop, he met Maryanne Amacher, Charlemagne Palestine, Serge Tcherepnin, Ingram Marshall, and Eliane Radigue. These composers kindled Chatham's interest in minimalism, which ultimately led him to study and work with La Monte Young, tuning his piano in just intonation in exchange for lessons, as well as playing with Tony Conrad's group, The Dream Syndicate.

Chatham studied tuning under Hugh Gough in New York and William Dowd in Cambridge and supported himself during the early seventies by tuning the instruments of such artists as Gustav Leonhardt and Glenn Gould. His ability to tune and hear harmonics lead to his interest in making compositions incorporating the overtone series.

Chatham was the founder of the music program at the Kitchen Center in downtown Manhattan in 1971, was its music director between 1971-73 and later from 1977-80, where he was responsible for programming more than 250 concerts of living composers during this period including the NEW MUSIC / NEW YORK Festival, which was the prototype upon which the NEW MUSIC AMERICA Festival was later based.

Chatham wrote his first composition in just intonation in 1971. Following the lead of musicians such as Young, Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, Cornelius Cardew, Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski, he then began working as a composer-performer with non-notated music of various sorts, which culminated in 1976 when he first started working as a kind of "secret agent" in the field of hard-rock, becoming an active figure on the late-night rock scene in New York City. With his composition, Guitar Trio (1977), Chatham became the first composer to make use of multiple electric guitars in special tunings to merge the extended-time music of the sixties and seventies with serious hard rock.

Chatham's interest returned to notation in the 1980s, which led him to write Die Donnergötter (1984-86) for electric guitar ensemble, later creating An Angel Moves Too Fast to See (1989) for a symphony of 100 electric guitars, electric bass, and drums. During the seventies and eighties, he devoted himself to combining the pounding, throbbing rhythms of rock with the aesthetic concerns of post-minimalism.

In the early nineties, Chatham began to focus his energy on playing trumpet and developing a personal "voice" on the instrument in the context of techno and trip-hop music, which culminated in the critically acclaimed 1997 release of Neon, with electronica composer Martin Wheeler, on N-Tone Records, a subsidiary of Ninja Tune. A second N-Tone album was released in 1998 with Jonathan Kane and Danny Hamilton, followed by a release in 1999 on the Wire Editions with Pat Thomas, Gary Smith, Gary Jeff, Lou Ciccotelli.

During the first decade of the 21st century, Chatham returned to writing ensemble pieces for large numbers of electric guitars. In 2005, Chatham was commissioned by the city of Paris to compose A Crimson Grail, a work for large electric guitar orchestra, which was premiered at the basilica of Sacré-Coeur for La Nuit Blanche, an all-night arts festival sponsored by the city of Paris. A 200-electric guitar outdoor version of this work was commissioned and performed in 2009 at Lincoln Center Out of Doors.

Chatham then decided to turn his attention back to brass and spent the spring of 2009 defining a new voice on trumpet, making use of multiphonics, extended brass techniques and electronics. The Bern Project CD, although recorded before this period, contains hints of the new style and was released on Hinterzimmer Records in January 2010 with Swiss musicians Reto Mäder, Mago Flueck, Julian Sotorius and Beat Unternäher. A new brass album will be released in the winter of 2010 with Chatham on trumpet and electronics, Jean-Marc Montera on electric guitar, and Kevin Shea on drums.

Rhys Chatham has collaborated and/or performed over the years with many artists and choreographers including Karole Armitage, Tony Conrad, Merce Cunningham, Angie Eng, Kenneth King, Robert Longo, Meredith Monk, Joseph Nechvatal, Phill Niblock, Cindy Sherman, and Woody & Steina Vasulka among many others.

Rhys Chatham remains active in avant-garde and post-minimalist music. He has lived in France since 1987.
www.rhyschatham.net/
www.nonesuch.com/artists/rhys-chatham

Some publications related to this event:
February and March, 2011 - 2011