Knuckleball A Jazz Brass (5tet) with Rhythm: A Jazz Who’s Who from New England & NY

(First concert of the series season)

https://www.lilypadinman.com/calendar

Music: Creative Improvisational Jazz / New Music

Stephen Haynes’
Knuckleball
A Jazz Brass (5tet) with Rhythm
A Jazz Who’s Who from New England and New York
A Live Recording
“Stephen Haynes is fusing together inventive ideas, original decisions, passionate melodies, sparkling culminations and extended playing techniques. His nervous, hysteric and expressive cornet is brought together…” Avant Scena

The roots of 1960’s avant-garde jazz are mixed up with the main tendencies of European, American, Chicago, New York and other streams of contemporary experimental jazz. The influence of contemporary music and academic avant-garde also is heard – classical forms, traditional ways of instrumentation and authentic expressions, rhythms and chords are used here.

The musicians are experimenting on various cases of musical language – they get on ambitious and wild free improvisations, sparkling riffs, dramatic and bright adventures or subtle lyrical contemplations. All that makes an effort to exclusive and modern sound. Avant Scena, review of Stephen Haynes, Ben Staap and Joe Morris “Mind Creation Sound Dasein”

Historical (Jazz) Cambridge: “Taylor (Ho Bynum), Bill and I (Haynes) opened for Sam Rivers and his trio at The Middle East in Cambridge, MA. In the audience was Syd Smart, who made it clear to us that he really belonged in this new aggregation”. Stephen Haynes.
(Stephen is known) “…not only for his superb playing but for his musical vision, which is all his own - despite the Bill Dixon tribute aspect - and his skill to have the other four musicians on the same wavelength to deliver this vision with such clarity and beauty”. Free Jazz Collective
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Herb Robertson: “One of the most talented and inquisitive trumpeters of the day.”
Bob Blumenthal /The Boston Globe.
“Trumpeter Robertson looks at jazz the way a mad scientist looks at test tubes-very daffy with equal roots in Cage and Mingus. Louis Armstrong would be proud. “ Option Magazine
Known for his original brass concept incorporating extended mute technique.
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Taylor Ho Bynum: “The music is designed to blur the lines between composition and improvisation, between individual and ensemble, between genres, timbres, and instrumentations; it celebrates the beauty and necessity of the unknown and the indefinable, the enigmatic and the subversive”. UMass/Dartmouth
Bynum says "I often describe composing for improvisers like building a playground, with slides and swings and climbing structures, where you offer opportunities for play without defining how a kid is going to play on it.
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Ben Staap: We are talking to one of the most instrumentalists of the young generation, the tubist Ben Stapp, about a joint album with Joe Morris and Stephen Haynes. – Jazzarium pl.
“Most certainly one to watch” – Glenn Astarita (All About Jazz).
“A record bursting with compositional ideas that are matches by equally sophisticated musicianship. Stapp’s imagination is limitless”. – Cisco Bradley, Jazz Right Now
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Eric Rosenthal: “…has developed a prominent career playing jazz and improvised music, recording and performing internationally with the big band Either/Orchestra, Roswell Rudd, Anthony Braxton, blues artist David Maxwell, John Voigt, Bhob Rainey, Jack Wright and others”. – Shirim Klezmer Orch.

“We used to attract primarily people interested in Jewish music, but now people come to our gigs because they like sonic exploration, intense groove and improvisation,” claims drummer Eric Rosenthal of Naftule’s Dream, a long-running Boston-based sextet…” - Jazz Times.

BIOS:
(from Wethersfield, CT) Stephen Haynes has been playing the cornet for most of his adult life. From So. Calif by way of Colorado and Wisconsin he began this love affair at age eight, studying with the legendary Frank Baird at the University of Colorado in Boulder. During the seventies, he studied with Bill Dixon at Bennington College. He continued to work and record with Dixon for the next 35 years. Haynes is an improviser, a committed arts organizer and activist with a deep focus on the local. With Joe Morris, he co-curated the Improvisations series at Real Art ways in Hartford, CT – where Haynes lives – presenting ten events annually for five years featuring a who’s who of artists in this music. Haynes is also a specialist in modern orchestra, and has worked intensively with a range of composers, including Cecil Taylor, Rhys Chatham, Tyshawn Sorey, Adam Rudolph, Butch Morris, Gunter Hampel, LaMonte Young, Makanda Ken McIntyre and George Russell. Haynes records infrequently as a leader and this latest project – Knuckleball – will be recorded live at The Lilypad in Cambridge and Firehouse 12 in New Haven for release in 2020.
Stephen is a recipient of an MSW concentration in Community Organizing. He spends his days working
with men who have experienced homelessness and those recently released from prison, at the Open Hearth Association's Working Man’s Center.

Clarence “Herb” Robertson: Internationally renowned as an innovative instrumentalist, composer and arranger in both traditional and avant-garde jazz idioms and new music. Born in 1951 in New Jersey, he began to play trumpet at age ten and he was introduced to jazz two years later by his junior high school music teacher, who turned him on to the music and recordings of Miles Davis, Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard and other great jazz trumpeters. In his early teens, Robertson began collecting jazz and classical records, intensely listening to and absorbing all styles, from Louis Armstrong to the avant-garde, with special emphasis on the era’s hard-bop style of jazz. After high school, during the years 1969-73, he attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston as an instrumental performance major, a period in which his improvisational skills became highly developed. In 1973 he left Berklee to go on the road in Canada as a lead trumpeter with various jazz-rock cover bands.
In 1975 Herb Robertson had to quit playing music for a short time when the strain of performing nightly in loud jazz-rock bands caused him to temporarily lose his trumpet chops. Robertson altered his playing style, becoming a more lyrical and explorative artist. In 1976 he started a rehearsal big band, while also playing in smaller ensembles with some of the more creative avant-garde musicians of New Jersey. He then met alto saxophonist Tim Berne in the late 1970s where he first gained attention for his playing with Berne’s groups during the years 1981-87. During this period he also became a member of long time collaborator and bassist Mark Helias’ groups.

Robertson recorded his initial leader album in 1985, and has since appeared on over 100 recording projects. On various other labels, he has recorded with many of the leading lights of the New York Downtown Scene. He also plays valve trombone, tuba, the Eb alto horn and “little instruments” and has performed at almost all European, American and Canadian festivals and American jazz clubs.

Taylor Ho Bynum (b. 1975) has spent his career navigating the intersections between structure and improvisation – through musical composition, performance and interdisciplinary collaboration, and through production, organizing, teaching, writing and advocacy. Bynum’s expressionistic playing on cornet and his expansive vision as composer have garnered him critical attention on over twenty recordings as a bandleader and dozens more as a sideman. Recent releases on the Firehouse 12 Records label include the 4-album set “Navigation” (2013) with his Sextet and 7-tette, and “Enter the Plustet” (2016), the debut recording of his 15-piece creative orchestra. “The Ambiguity Manifesto”, featuring Bynum’s 9-tette, will be released in the late summer of 2019. He is also recognized for his “Acoustic Bicycle Tours”, where he travels to concerts solely by bike across thousands of miles.

Current collective projects include his long-running duo with drummer Tomas Fujiwara, Illegal Crowns (with Fujiwara, Mary Halvorson, and Benoit Delbecq) and Geometry (with Kyoko Kitamura, Tomeka Reid, and Joe Morris). Other well-documented projects have included Bynum’s SpiderMonkey Strings, Masters of Ceremony (an interdisciplinary dance/music quartet with Rachel Bernsen, Melanie Maar, and Abraham Gomez-Delgado), Positive Catastrophe (a 10-piece Latin free-jazz band co-led with Gomez-Delgado), and the collective ensembles the Thirteenth Assembly (Fujiwara, Halvorson, and Jessica Pavon. Bynum’s two decades of work with Anthony Braxton is recognized as one of the most generative partnerships of that legendary composer’s career, with projects ranging from duos to orchestras and everything in between. He has also worked closely with such departed masters as Bill Dixon and Cecil Taylor, with other recent sideman credits including Nels Cline, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Tomas Fujiwara, Jim Hobbs, Jason Kao Hwang, Ingrid Laubrock, Bill Lowe, Nicole Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Yo La Tengo.

In 2017, Bynum became the director of the jazz and creative music ensemble at UMass Dartmouth where he also teaches composition and improvisation. He regularly travels to conduct explorations of new creative orchestra music, with works premiered by the Scottish BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Tri-Centric Orchestra, and has taught at universities and workshops worldwide. He is the co-founder of the Firehouse 12 Records label, a former curator for the Festival of New Trumpet Music, and a board member for the New England Foundation for the Arts.

Ben Staap (b. 1/1982): “I don't want to choose between composing and improvising” - interview with Ben Stapp.
Splitting his time between Portugal and NY, tuba and euphonium player Ben Stapp's association with guitarist Joe Morris and cornetist Stephen Haynes started in 2011, including participating in their Improvisations series, leading to this trio performing Stapp's compositions with musical forms based on the narrative structure of his novel "Mind Creature Sound Dasein".

Tubist and Composer Ben Stapp, although classically trained with Tommy Johnson and Roger Bobo while pursuing his love for jazz tuba, Ben further opened up his horizons while living in Portugal, hanging out at Clean Feed’s record store. Since then he’s been living in New York since 2007 and experienced the diversity of New York’s music scene including engagements with Steven Bernstein’s Universal Melody Brass Band, ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), toured with Red Barrat, played with the Garden State Philharmonia at Carnegie Hall, with Slavic Soul Party, Mario Pavone’s Accordion Project, playing Earle Brown with the ECCE Ensemble at MIT, frequent traditional jazz and brass band freelancer, Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, tubist for the Chelsea Symphony, with TILT at Lincoln Center to Premier John Luther Adam’s Sila, for Eli Yamin’s Blues Band, Sousaphone player for Jacob Sac’s live Heavens Trombone Choir, plays tuba in Stephen Haynes Quintet with Joe Morris, Warren Smith, and William Parker, and dedicated Colombian-music tubist with Martin Vejarano’s Cumbia River Band, Chia’s Dance Party, Pablo Mayor’s Folkore Eurbano, and the experimental Alejandro Florez’ Tin Throat Ensemble.

Eric Rosenthal. Born in Cleveland, 1965, attended Wesleyan University where he received a BA in music studying Jazz drumming with Ed Blackwell, West African drumming and dance music with Freeman Donkor and Abraham Adzinyah, and the Carnatic music of South India with T.Ranganathan and T. Viswanathan. After Wesleyan he spent a year in India studying the Mrdangam drum and when he returned focused exclusively on the drum set, studying with Bob Gulloti.
Most recently he’s focused on improvised music, hosting my own series Point .01 at the Lilypad. Last year he was involved in several new recordings with Pandelis Karayorgis, including a trio with Damon Smith soon to be released on a Polish jazz label, and a "double trio" with Damon, Nate, Luther and Pandelis, coming out in the spring on Driff. He also recorded recently with electronic musician, videographer and sculpture Andrew Neuman, including Junko Fujiwara, Damon Smith and Forbes Graham.
Rosenthal has performed and improvised with Anthony Braxton, Mat Maneri, Pandelis Karayorgis, Mario Pavone, and the Either/Orchestra. He has performed all over North America and Europe, and appeared in Greece at the Patras Jazz Festival, at Montreal's North Sea Jazz festival, even at Finland's Pori Festival. The late '90s found Rosenthal busy in the group Naftule's Dream. The band has two releases on John Zorn's Tzadik label, Search for the Golden Dreydl and Smash.

He splits time these days between painting and improvising, producing the monthly Point 01 series at the Lilypad, and even has an occasional opportunity to play with my long standing group of nearly 25 years, Naftule's Dream, the seminal Klezmer Rock Improvising sextet with 5 cd's on the Tzadik and Innova labels.

The Creative Music Series (CMS) was established in January, 2015, to showcase the work of adventurous jazz musicians from out-of-state, presenting them in intimate venues in the Cambridge/Somerville area. My endeavor was a reaction to the apparent lack of invitations being extended to accomplished, new talent and even unknown musicians to the Boston area. CMS has now begun to zero in on Boston based musicians who are creating their own projects with these out-of-town guests, and taking these musical risks to find an expression and gain a wider appreciation.s us next."

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