Jazz Matinee: Julian Gerstin Sextet + Taylor Ho Bynum / Tomas Fujiwara

The Julian Gerstin Sextet play original jazz infused with burning Caribbean rhythms and the beautiful melodies of Arabic and Balkan music. A tight-knot group with some of New England’s finest improvisors, the musicians enjoy playing off one another, turning corners and discovering unexpected places. Julian Gerstin provides the compositions and an endless variety of world percussion, Anna Patton is on clarinet, Don Anderson trumpet, Eugene Uman piano, Wes Brown bass and Ben James drum set. Between them, the group has performed with a mind-bending range of musicians: from proto-rocker Bo Diddley to punk legend Richard Hell, foundational jazz artists Earl “Fatha” Hines and Sheila Jordan to contemporary masters Wadada Leo Smith and Anthony Davis, Latin jazzer Bobby Sanabria, Afropop stars Orlando Julius and Baba Ken Okulolo, traditional drummers Olatunji and Bomba de Aquí, and numerous others —all strands in the Sextet’s creative fabric.

Over the past thirty years, over twenty-five albums and hundreds of gigs in dozens of different bands, drummer Tomas Fujiwara and cornettist Taylor Ho Bynum have developed one of the deeper levels of creative communication in the contemporary music scene - in groups under Fujiwara's leadership like Triple Double and Shizuko, ensembles led by Bynum including his Sextet, 9-tette, and PlusTet big band, and collective projects like Illegal Crowns (with Mary Halvorson and Benoit Delbecq) and the Thirteenth Assembly (with Halvorson and Jessica Pavone). Throughout this history, they've maintained their duo, which has released four albums: "True Events" (2007), "Stepwise" (2010), "Through Foundation" (2014), and "Notice" (2022).

Described as “a ubiquitous presence in the New York scene…an artist whose urbane writing is equal to his impressively nuanced drumming,” (Point of Departure) Brooklyn-based Tomas Fujiwara is an active player in some of the most exciting music of the current generation. He leads the bands Triple Double, 7 Poets Trio, and Tomas Fujiwara & The Hook Up; is a member of the collective trio Thumbscrew (with Mary Halvorson and Michael Formanek); has a collaborative duo with Taylor Ho Bynum; and engages in a diversity of creative work with Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Mary Halvorson, Tomeka Reid, Matana Roberts, Taylor Ho Bynum, Nicole Mitchell, Ben Goldberg, Amir ElSaffar, Benoit Delbecq, and many others. In 2021, he won the Downbeat Critics Poll for Rising Star Drummer, and premiered two suites of new music as part of his Roulette Residency: “You Don’t Have to Try” (with Meshell Ndegeocello) and “Shizuko.” His latest album is "Dream Up," a suite for percussion quartet, commissioned by NYSCA and Roulette Intermedium and just released on Out of Your Head Records. “Drummer Tomas Fujiwara works with rhythm as a pliable substance, solid but ever shifting. His style is forward-driving but rarely blunt or aggressive, and never random. He has a way of spreading out the center of a pulse while setting up a rigorous scaffolding of restraint…A conception of the drum set as a full-canvas instrument, almost orchestral in its scope.” (New York Times)

Taylor Ho Bynum is a musician, teacher, and writer, with a background including work in composition, performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, production, organizing, and advocacy. His expressionistic playing on cornet and other brass instruments, his expansive vision as composer, and his idiosyncratic improvisational approach have been documented on over twenty recordings as a bandleader and over a hundred as a sideperson. His past endeavors include his Acoustic Bicycle Tours (where he traveled to concerts solely by bike across thousands of miles) and his stewardship of Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Centric Foundation (which he served as executive director from 2010-2018, producing and performing on many major Braxton projects, including two operas and multiple festivals). Bynum has worked with other legendary figures such as Bill Dixon and Cecil Taylor and currently enjoys playing with friends in collective ensembles like his duo with Tomas Fujiwara, Illegal Crowns (with Fujiwara, Benoit Delbecq, and Mary Halvorson), and Geometry (with Kyoko Kitamura, Tomeka Reid, and Joe Morris), and as a sideperson in groups led by Fujiwara, Reid, Jim Hobbs, Bill Lowe, Bill Cole, and William Parker, among others. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Baffler, Point of Departure and Sound American, and he has been the director of the Coast Jazz Orchestra at Dartmouth College since 2017.

For this special matinee, doors are at 5pm and music will start at 530. This show is all ages and seating is limited and also first come first served.

Thanks to a grant from TD Charitable Foundation, this show has an Access For All option which lets you name your price (you can't buy multiples of this option at the same time, so to buy more than one ticket, it is necessary to do each additional ticket in a different transaction).

Host or Publisher Nova Arts