Steve Lands presents MODUS-ANNON
About this Event
STEVE LANDS presents MODUS-ANNON
A Jazz Generations Initiative 2026 Jazz Cohort Culminating Concert
6:30pm Doors | 7:30pm Show | All Ages
Throughout 2026, this year’s JGI Jazz Cohort fellows have been contemplating healing in practice, democracy within jazz culture, and intergenerationality in the discipline of music.
For cohort fellow Steve Lands, this has led to a new generation of musicians folding into what has become over the last five years, an ever-evolving, multi-movement series in New Orleans known as his Rearranging the Planets. Already a series of original suites democratic in its approach to composition among peers, this latest iteration of this suite now finds Lands teaching his music to students beginning to emerge as their own players.
Modus-Annon is about the Sun and the Moon and what they represent in our lives. The piece is a continuation of Lands’ Rearranging the Planets concept, where he composes music around the meanings we’ve associated with the celestial bodies that surround us. In that suite, he used English classical composer Gustav Holst’s piece The Planets as a springboard to compose and arrange music about the planets in the solar system and their association with us through more diverse cosmological perspectives.
For this next movement, Modus-Annon – loosely translated as “the mode of one course” – Lands wanted to give a similar treatment to the two stellar entities we most regularly engage with, the Sun and Moon. This time, the music is composed entirely by Lands and frames the Sun as a representation of strife, or the work of life, while the Moon is framed as the reason for the spiritual motivation for our lives. The entire suite serves as the soundtrack of a single day in anyone’s life, from dawn when we typically wake up, all the way to dusk when we lay down again to rest.
While the music is fully composed, no two groups of musicians would possibly sound the same playing it. This band has been selected to play this music because how Lands composes tends to depend partially on the opinions and approaches of the people playing it. Their musical opinions on the matter hold some sway over how the piece ends up sounding. Everyone offers their take on the Sun and the Moon, and strife and purpose, and morning and night. And for the first time in the Planets series, the band consists of a group of younger emerging artists, most of whom have expressed an interest in learning or playing some of Lands’ original music. That opportunity is now here.
“Our life is all but a test/ Practically spinning at our boss's behest/ But when the day ends/ we see family and friends/ And we become unbothered by the rest.” ~Steve Lands on Modus-Annon
Tonight’s performance features:
Steve Lands - trumpet
Gladney - tenor saxophone
Amina Scott - bass
Arnold Little III - guitar
Chloe White - alto saxophone
Izzy Chase - piano, keys
Mason Tanner - drums
Amber Rene - vocals
Noe Cugny - visuals
- Special Guests TBA
$20 GA Advance Online. $30 Day of Show. First-Come, First-Served Seating.
All Ages Welcome.
ABOUT STEVE LANDS:
Stephen Lands is a Baton Rouge-bred, New Orleans-based trumpeter and composer who’s had the distinct pleasure of performing with some of world’s greatest musicians, including touring and recording with the world-renowned Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Elvis Costello, Jazz at Lincoln Center alumni Herlin Riley, Wess “Warmdaddy” Anderson, Victor Goines and Ronald Westray, Shannon “King of Tremé” Powell, Jason Marsalis, Evan Christopher, Grammy nominees Cyrille Aimée and Jamison Ross, Quiana Lynell, and most recently, PJ Morton.
As a composer, he’s scored the music for a handful of projects with filmmaker Marion Hill, including 2021’s Sundance Film Festival Award-winning feature, Ma Belle, My Beauty, and serves as co-musical director with Oscar Rossignoli for Hill’s new live multimedia project, Saigon Jazz Revival.
Hot on the heels of two sold-out debut performances of his current signature project, “Rearranging the Planets” for the Spring 2022 season at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), Lands has since been presenting new movements from this body of original compositions, such as the project’s little sister, “KosmiKrewe” aka “Cosmic Roux.”
Learn More: https://www.thestevelands.space |
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Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 20.00 to USD 30.00
