Other Minds Festivals ➔ John Luther Adams, Evan Ziporyn, Billy Bang, and Charles Amirkhanian, seated, during panel discussion, ver. 13, San Francisco CA (2005)
Still image
Identifier
IM.OM.FP.0011b.049Dates
2005-02-26 | createdWork Type
Digital photographImage Class
Composer & Performer PortraitsImage Series
OM11: Hearne Colored JpegsDescription
John Luther Adams, Evan Ziporyn, Billy Bang, and Charles Amirkhanian (l to r), during OM 11’s pre-concert panel discussion at the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, in San Francisco CA, on February 26, 2005. The third concert of the 11th Other Minds Music Festival began with a panel discussion with that evenings three featured composers, moderated by Charles Amirkhanian.From his home in Alaska, John Luther Adams has created a unique musical world grounded in wilderness landscapes and indigenous cultures, and in natural phenomena from the songs of birds to elemental noise. His music includes works for orchestra, small ensembles, percussion and electronic media. Adams has worked with many prominent performers and venues, including Bang On A Can, the California E.A.R. Unit, FLUX Quartet, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, and the Percussion Group Cincinnati among others. He has served as composer in residence with the Anchorage Symphony, Fairbanks Symphony, Arctic Chamber Orchestra, Anchorage Opera, and the Alaska Public Radio Network. He has taught at the University of Alaska, Bennington College and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and has served as president of the American Music Center.
From Lincoln Center to Balinese temples, from loft spaces to international festivals, composer/performer Evan Ziporyn has traveled the globe in search of new musical possibilities. His work is informed by his 23-year involvement with Balinese gamelan, which has ranged from intensive study of traditional music to the creation of a series of groundbreaking works for gamelan and western instruments. As a bass clarinetist, he has developed a distinctive set of extended techniques which he has used in his own solo works, as well as new works by Martin Bresnick, Michael Gordon, and David Lang. Born in Chicago in 1959, Ziporyn received degrees from Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley, where his teachers included John Blacking, Martin Bresnick, Gerard Grisey, and David Lewin. Upon completing a Fullbright Fellowship in Indonesia, he became Musical Coordinator of San Francisco's Gamelan Sekar Jaya in 1988. Moving to Boston in 1990 to take a teaching position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he founded Gamelan Galak Tika in 1993.
The violin is hardly the first instrument that comes to mind when you think about jazz, but that’s never daunted Billy Bang, one of the instrument’s most adventurous exponents. Over the past decades Bang’s hard-edged tone, soulful sense of traditional swing and evocatively expressive style has enhanced over two dozen albums by top names in a variety of genres, from the blistering funk of Bootsy Collins and the harmolodic groove of Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society to the intergalactic uproar of Sun Ra. Born William Vincent Walker in Mobile, Alabama in 1947, his family moved to New York City’s Harlem while he was still an infant. In junior high school he was nicknamed Billy Bang after a cartoon character, and over his initial protests, it stuck.
Charles Amirkhanian is the Executive and Artistic Director of Other Minds, and for over 40 years has been a tireless promoter of New Music and a champion of under recognized composers and performers.
Genres & Subjects
Group portraits--2000-2010Men
Composers
Discussion
Photo Credits
Dennis HearneRelated Event
Other Minds Festival 11Related place
San Francisco (Calif.) (was created at)Related Entities
Hearne, DennisAdams, John Luther, 1953-
Ziporyn, Evan
Bang, Billy
Amirkhanian, Charles
Other Minds Festival