34th Annual Winter Solstice Evening Concert 2024

Name: 34th Annual Winter Solstice Evening Concert 2024
Start: 2024-12-22T20:00:00-06:00
Location: 3111 N Western Ave Chicago IL 60618

Schedule

Sun Dec 22 2024 at 08:00 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

3111 N Western Ave Chicago IL 60618 | Chicago, IL

8:00PM. $30.

This year, Winter Solstice Concerts invites NYC-based bassist, composer, writer and arts activist William Parker to Chicago. On the first evening, 12/21, William will join Hamid Drake to perform their legendary duo. They will be join by a first sit featuring legendary Chicago guitarist, Bill MacKay along with Michael Zerang performing their acoustic duo. On the second night, 12/22, William Parker will put together an ensemble of Chicago-based musicians to perform his original composition CHICAGO SHOUT.

William Parker presents the premiere of an original composition, CHICAGO SHOUT
William Parker - bass, composition
Zahra Glenda Baker - voice
Ben Lamar Gay - trumpet
Jim Baker - piano
Hamid Drake - percussion
Michael Zerang - percussion
+ Special guests!

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William Parker is a bassist, improviser, composer, writer, and educator from New York City. He has recorded over 150 albums, published six books, and taught and mentored hundreds of young musicians and artists.

He has been called “one of the most inventive bassists/leaders since [Charles] Mingus,” and “the creative heir to Jimmy Garrison and Paul Chambers...directly influenced by ‘60s avant-gardists like Sirone, Henry Grimes and Alan Silva.” The Village Voice called him, “the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time” and Time Out New York named him one of the “50 Greatest New York Musicians of All Time.”

Parker’s current active bands include the large-band Little Huey Creative Orchestra, the Raining on the Moon Sextet, the In Order to Survive Quartet, Stan’s Hat Flapping in the Wind, the Cosmic Mountain Quintet with Hamid Drake, Kidd Jordan, and Cooper-Moore, as well as a deep and ongoing solo bass study. His recordings have long been documented by the AUM Fidelity record label and on his own Centering Records, among others. He also has a duo project "Hope Cries For Justice [https://www.patricianicholsonparker.com/hope-cries-for-justice/]" with Patricia Nicholson Parker [https://www.patricianicholsonparker.com/] which combines music, story telling, poetry and dance

Over the decades, Parker has developed a reputation as a connector and hub of information concerning the history of creative music, recently culminating in a two hefty volumes of interviews with over 60 avant-garde and creative musicians, Conversations I & II. He is also the subject of an exhaustive 468-page “sessionography” that documents thousands of performances and recording sessions, a remarkable chronicle of his prolificness as an active artist.
He has been a key figure in the New York and European creative music scenes since the 1970s, and has worked all over the world. He has performed with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Peter Brotzmann, Milford Graves, Peter Kowald, and David S. Ware, among many others.

William Parker works all over the world but he always returns to New York’s Lower East Side, where he has lived since 1975.

http://www.williamparker.net/biography

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Hamid Drake

This brilliant, sensitive, endlessly rhythmic, intelligent, spiritual, and powerful drummer /percussionist from Chicago was born in 1955 in Monroe, Louisiana, and his family moved to Evanston, Illinois when he was a child, just as an older musician from Monroe named Fred Anderson also moved to Evanston with his own family and started out playing with local rock and R&B bands, which eventually brought him to the great Fred Anderson’s attention, with whom he has worked intensively from 1974 to 2010 when Fred left us..including Anderson’s 1979 The Missing Link. Through workshops Fred Anderson was giving, young Hamid first got to know Douglas Ewart, George Lewis, and other members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Another of the most significant percussion influences, Ed Blackwell [http://www.nme.com/artists/ed-blackwell] dates from this period. Hamid’s flowing rhythmic expressions and interest in the roots of the music drew other like~minded musicians together into a performance and educational collective named the Mandingo Griot Society, which combined traditional African music and narrative with distinctly American influences appearing on the group’s first album, and has played reggae. Don Cherry, who Drake first met in 1978, was another continuing collaborator, he worked extensively with him from 1978 until Cherry’s death in 1995.

After meeting Don Cherry, Hamid Drake and fellow percussionist Adam Rudolph travelled with Don to Europe, where they spent much time exploring the interior landscape of percussion, while working nonstop to share deeply in Mr. Cherry’s grasp of music’s spiritually infinite transformational possibilities. Hamid Drake studied drums extensively, including eastern and Caribbean styles, he also frequently plays without sticks, using his hands to develop subtly commanding undertones. His tabla playing is also notable for his subtlety and flair. Drake’s questing nature and his interest in Caribbean percussion led to a deep involvement with reggae.

Now touring and recording all over the world, and in constant demand everywhere, Hamid Drake has played and / or recorded with Fred Anderson, Peter Brötzmann, Don Cherry, Marilyn Crispell, Pierre Dorge, Johnny Dyani, Hassan Hakmoun, Herbie Hancock, Joseph Jarman, George Lewis, bassist William Parker (in a large number of lineups), and has performed a solstice celebration with fellow Chicago percussionist Michael Zerang annually since 1991, ARchie Shepp, David Murray, Sabir Mateen, Joe McPhee, Jim Pepper, Dewey Redman, Adam Rudolph, Pharoah Sanders, Foday Musa Suso, John Tchicai, and almost all the members of the AACM.

He has also maintained his ties to world music through work with Foday Musa Suso and many others.

With these diverse artists, playing in a broad range of musical settings, Drake comfortably adapts to north and west African and Indian impulses as well as reggae and Latin.

More and more, though he’s engaged as a sideman, he’s devoting his energies and creatiivity as band leader and co-leader focusing on his own groups and projects such as Bindu and the Indigo Trio (with Nicole Mitchell and Harrison Bankhead), the duet with the italian vibraphone player Pasquale Mirra, as duet also with Iva Bittova, Paolo Angeli, Michel Portal.

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Michael Zerang
Michael Zerang was born in Chicago, Illinois and is a first generation American of Assyrian decent. He has been an active musician, composer, and producer since 1976, focusing extensively on improvised music, free jazz, contemporary composition, puppet theater, experimental theater, and international musical forms.

He has been a long-standing member of The Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, Friction Brothers, Brötzmann/McPhee/Kessler/Zerang Quartet, and Survival Unit III with Joe McPhee and Fred Lonberg-Holm.

He has collaborated extensively with contemporary theater, dance, and other multidisciplinary forms and has received three Joseph Jefferson Awards for Original Music Composition in Theater, in 1996, 1998, and 2000. He has over one-hundred titles in his discography and has toured nationally and internationally to 34 countries since 1981 with and ever-widening pool of collaborators.

He was the artistic director of the Link's Hall Performance Series from 1985-1989 where he produced over 300 concerts of jazz, traditional ethnic folk music, electronic music, and other forms of forward thinking music. He continued to produce concerts at Cafe Urbus Orbis from 1994-1996, and at his own space, The Candlestick Maker in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood, from 2001 - 2005.

http://www.michaelzerang.com/
https://pinkpalace.bandcamp.com [https://pinkpalace.bandcamp.com/]