Concert: Alternating Currents Live presents The Bridge #2.11

Alternating Currents Live presents The Bridge #2.11 featuring

Greg Ward—alto saxophone

Nicolas Peoc’h—alto saxophone

Hélène Labarrière—double bass

Isaiah Spencer—drums

Improvising musicians meet in the world, in real life, to really be together—human beings on Earth—to feel and propagate vibrations, to plunge into the same cosmic flow, and then send it back out into the universe, at the very least. Hélène Labarrière remembers witnessing this for the first time at the Café de l'Univers: “I was 15 when I discovered jazz. It wasn't by listening to a record, nor by going to a concert in a beautiful hall, no, it was in a tiny restaurant in the center of Paris. There, I saw and heard young musicians playing all night long. There were about ten of them, packed around an upright piano, double bass and drums, and from evening to morning they played. Some of them already knew each other, others not. That evening was a revelation for the teenager I was then, and from that day on, the desire for new encounters and unknown adventures has never left me. In a world where human beings are disappearing a little more every day in the name of profit, where freedom is being taken away from us in the name of war or health security, playing, laughing and singing seem to me more necessary than ever."

We can’t say it often enough, so we'll say it again: creative music creates singularity by recreating space-time. By bringing together approximate bodies, in the same place and on the same backdrop, at the same time, and from past to future, from present to future, and back again. From Chicago: Greg Ward, one of the most agile and zesty saxophonists of his generation, a distant descendant of Johnny Hodges and a close partner of Mike Reed, a worthy disciple of Von Freeman or Fred Anderson, i.e. unique in his genre (free funk, swing, or otherwise), whom nothing frightens, in a flash or a plume of smoke. Isaiah Spencer has also proven himself on the Chicago stage or belvedere, since his apprenticeship with Ernest Khabeer Dawkins: his (hypersensitive) drumming is obviously propulsive, is naturally ardent; he feigns a certain nervousness to adhere to everything going on around him and more. From France and Brittany: double bassist Hélène Labarrière sails and capsizes freely over the equator, the tropics and even the meridians, thanks to the submarine of the most liberated (unsubdued) jazz, but also on the sailboats of so-called traditional music or the steamships of so-called contemporary music. Nicolas Peoc'h frequents the same casino, the same roulette table between aesthetics that are as many numbers for his ball or his saxophone, within truth the same love for the game, for playing: he maneuvers and spins, this time with the mercury of jazz, from garage to Latin American to West African music. No one can predict the outcome of their story, except that it began as a story and will end as a story. At least this one, to begin with, to play with: improvising musicians meet—human beings on Earth—to melt backgrounds. To sift through the “here and now” in search of ephemeral or eternal nuggets of gold. 22 black odd and lacking.

The Bridge is supported by Ministère de la Culture, Sacem, Centre National de la Musique, Spedidam, Adami, Institut Français, Experimental Sound Studio & the University of Chicago, with the support of the France Chicago Center, the University of Chicago Department of Music, the Julie and Parker Hall Endowment for Jazz and American Music, and the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts.

The Bridge #2.11 has been made possible through Jazz & New Music, a program of Villa Albertine and FACE Foundation, in partnership with the French Embassy in the United States with support from the French Ministry of Culture, Institut français, SACEM, and the CNM.

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