The Distant Pairs events are FREE to stream. In lieu of purchasing Series tickets, please consider making a $25 suggested donation (or an amount that you feel is meaningful) in support of ISSUE's 2020 commissions and Artist Fund.
Wednesday, October 28th, ISSUE is pleased to stream a new collaborative work between London-based pianist and composer Veryan Weston & New York-based experimental saxophonist and composer Ingrid Laubrock. The artists present “Art and Life in Self-Isolation,” commissioned by ISSUE.
The film reflects the present state of many artists now having to work apart in self-isolation. Laubrock and Weston have worked together, including the album Haste with cellist Hannah Marshall, but now live on separate continents—New York and near London. It is a collaboration in isolation.
The film consists of sequences of activities that interconnect and run parallel with one another. They consist of short films of the artists own current day-to-day activities as well as art-related interests. All are bound together by their own music which has been conceived for the film itself. Themes presented in the film will run simultaneously as parts of a split screen and will reflect the fractured online virtual social interactions, such as “Zoom” events, which have now become common practice for some in a post-pandemic world. These will sometimes be seen in the same way as fragments running simultaneously but separated and isolated into glimpsed units, similar to the intriguing world, as observed through binoculars, by L. B. Jefferies in Hitchcock's “Rear Window.”
The music will be collaboratively made using composition and improvisation. Music can also be based and built on the audio world of each of these units, perhaps becoming a larger and more colourful orchestra the more windows of activities there are seen on the one screen.
During the Fall, 2020, ISSUE is commissioning artists to produce collaborative work at a time when the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has drastically impacted their ability to travel and perform, and altered the nature of collective work and performance. Pairing artists in disparate locations who cannot work together in “traditional” ways, the Distant Pairs series examines the collaborative process, methods of working, and partnership amidst these constrained conditions.
Ingrid Laubrock is an experimental saxophonist and composer, interested in exploring the borders between musical realms and creating multi-layered, dense and often evocative sound worlds. A prolific composer, Laubrock was named "one of the most distinctive rising compositional voices" by Point Of Departure and a "fully committed saxophonist and visionary" by the New Yorker. Her main projects as a leader are Anti-House, Serpentines and Ingrid Laubrock Sextet. Laubrock has performed with Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Jason Moran, Kris Davis, Tyshawn Sorey, Mary Halvorson, Tom Rainey, Tim Berne, Dave Douglas and many others. Laubrock has composed for ensembles ranging from duo to chamber orchestra. Awards include Fellowship in Jazz Composition by the Arts Foundation in 2006, the 2009 SWR German Radio Jazz Prize and the 2014 German Record Critics Quarterly Award. She won best Rising Star Soprano Saxophonist in the 'Downbeat Annual Critics Poll in 2015 and best Tenor Saxophonist in 2018. Laubrock is one of the recipients of the 2019 Herb Alpert Ragdale Prize in Music Composition and has received composing commissions by The Shifting Foundation, The Jerwood Foundation, American Composers Orchestra, Tricentric Foundation, SWR New Jazz Meeting, The Jazz Gallery Commissioning Series, NYSCA, John Zorn's Stone Commissioning Series and the EOS Orchestra.
Veryan Weston was awarded ‘Young Jazz Musician of 1979’ by GLAA. In the '80s, Veryan worked internationally with Lol Coxhill (with whom he made his first recordings – Ogun 525 and Random Radar), the Eddie Prévost Quartet and Trevor Watts – an innovator who, in his band Moiré Music, used a unique combination of African rhythmic structures with the European musical tradition (Arc 02). In the '90s, collaborations with Phil Minton included the Ways duos, Songs from a Prison Diary awarded the Cornelius Cardew composition prize, a quartet performing extracts from Joyce’s Finnegans wake (with Phil, John Butcher and Roger Turner), and 4Walls with Luc Ex and Michael Vatcher. And most recently - Ways for an Orchestra commissioned by the Angelica Festival (Bologna, Italy - 2017). Collaborations with Jon Rose on the ‘Temperament Project’ use improvisation with different acoustic keyboards and violins with selected tunings derived from science, history and the imagination. Most recent project has included Hannah Marshall with the Tuning Out Tour (EMANEM double 4141). He collaborated with John Edwards and Mark Sanders (EMANEM 4028, 4214, and 4205), the Trio of Uncertainty with cellist Hannah Marshall and violinist Satoko Fukuda (EMANEM 4141), Luc Ex in Sol6 (Red Note 15) which included saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and Hannah Marshall in a trio called Haste. (EMANEM 5025). ‘Tessellations’ is an ongoing composition project based around research on pentatonic scales and has produced: 1. Tessellations for piano (EMANEM 4095), 2 a commissioned piece for Austrian singers - the Vociferous Choir (EMANEM 5015), 3 a string quartet, and 4 'The Make Project' – a Toronto-based project commissioned by Canadian Arts (Released – January 2018). The latest project, in which Veryan plays keystation, is Crossings/i> with Hannah Marshall and Mark Sanders. There are 9 pieces using a diversity of sounds.
