RHYS CHATHAM TRUMPET TRIO (featuring Frank Rosaly & David Daniell) Paris-based musician and composer Rhys Chatham has reached legendary status in experimental music circles, best-known most recently for high profile productions of his rugged noise symphonies written for hundreds of guitars. For this concert, Chatham teams up with guitarist David Daniell and drummer Frank Rosaly. Chatham deploys extended playing techniques inherited from the glory days of free jazz (Don Cherry, Bill Dixon) as well as leaders of the minimalist movement (Tony Conrad, Jon Hassell, La Monte Young…) of which he is one of the successors. Arriving at a mix that ebulliently exits from various horns and axes while simultaneously going through the stomp boxes and electronic devices, Chatham seamlessly fuses downtempo, flexistential insanity with driving rock rhythms and screaming metal riffs liberally morphed with hydrogen jukebox delay trumpet. Frank Rosaly is a Chicago-based drummer and composer. He has been active in experimental and improvised music for the past ten years, as a member of Matana Robert's Chicago Project, Rob Mazurek’s Mandarin Movie, The Rempis Percussion Quartet, Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten Quintet, Jeff Parker/Nels Cline Quartet, and many others. Other recent performances have included collaborations with collaborations with Peter Brotzmann, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Coleman, Paul Flaherty, Marshall Allen, Ken Vandermark, and Michael Zerang. David Daniell is a Chicago-based guitarist and composer who has collaborated extensively with Rhys Chatham throughout the last four years, including the 2006 Die Donnergötter tour, 2007 Guitar Trio tour, and as Concertmaster for Rhys' 100- and 200-guitar ensemble performances. He has worked for fifteen years as a member of the improvising blues-drone trio San Agustin and with many other collaborators including Loren Connors, Tim Barnes, Jeph Jerman, Thurston Moore, Tomas Korber, Greg Davis and Jonathan Kane. Current active collaborations include a duo with Douglas McCombs (Brokeback, Tortoise), a trio with Christian Fennesz and Tony Buck (The Necks), and the quartet Apiary with Steven Hess (Pan American, Haptic, On), Jason Stein (Locksmith Isidore) and Joseph Clayton Mills (Haptic). RHYS CHATHAM Rhys Chatham (born September 19, 1952, New York City) is an American composer, guitarist, and trumpet player, primarily active in avant-garde and minimalist music. He is best known for his "guitar orchestra" compositions. He has lived in France since 1987. Early years Chatham began his musical career as a piano tuner for avant-garde pioneer La Monte Young as well as classical pianist Glenn Gould. He soon studied under electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick and minimalist icon Tony Conrad; Chatham and Conrad played together in an early ensemble. In 1971, while still in his teens, Chatham founded the music program at the experimental art space The Kitchen in lower Manhattan. His early works, such as Two Gongs (1971) owed a significant debt to Young and other minimalists. His concert productions included experimenters Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, and early alternative rockers such as Brian Eno, Robert Fripp Arto Lindsay, and Fred Frith. He has worked closely with visual artist/musician Robert Longo, particularly in the 1980s, and on an experimental opera called XS: The Opera Opus (1984) with the visual artist Joseph Nechvatal. Compositions from the late 1970s and early 1980s By 1977, Chatham's music was heavily influenced by punk rock, having seen an early Ramones concert. He was particularly intrigued by and influential upon the group of artists music critics would label No Wave in 1978. That year, he began performing his composition Guitar Trio around downtown Manhattan with an ensemble that included Glenn Branca and Nina Canal of Ut. During this period, he wrote several works for large guitar ensembles, including Drastic Classicism, a collaboration with choreographer Karole Armitage. Drastic Classicism was first released in 1982 on the compilation New Music from Antarctica, put together by Kit Fitzgerald, John Sanborn and Peter Laurence Gordon. It was also included on the 1987 album that also included his 1982 composition Die Donnergötter (German for "The Thundergods"). Members of the New York City noise rock band Band of Susans began their careers in Chatham's ensembles; they later performed a cover of Chatham's Guitar Trio on their 1991 album, The Word And The Flesh. Chatham began playing trumpet in 1983, and his more recent works explore improvisatory trumpet solos; these are performed by Chatham himself, employing much of the same amplification and effects that he acquired with the guitar, over synthesized dance rhythms by the composer Martin Wheeler. His 1990s recordings in this style saw release on Ninja Tune Records as the compilation Neon. Recent activity In 2002, he enjoyed a resurgence following the release of a limited-edition 3-CD retrospective box set on the record label Table of the Elements, An Angel Moves Too Fast To See: Selected Works 1971-1989, complete with 130-page booklet. The An Angel Moves Too Fast To See part of the title comes from Chatham's 1989 composition for 100 guitars. He has been since touring with his 100-guitar orchestra in Europe, North America and Australia. In 2005, he was commissioned by the City of Paris, in his adopted homeland, to write a composition for 400 electric guitars entitled A Crimson Grail, as part of the Nuit Blanche Festival. Approximately 10,000 people were present at the performance, and 100,000 more watched it on live television. A CD of excerpts from this concert was released in January 2007 by Table Of The Elements. Rhys Chatham is currently touring the original 30-minute version of Guitar Trio in the USA and Europe, renamed G3 because the instrumentation has been increased to between six and ten electric guitars, electric bass and drums. In February 2007 he completed a twelve-city tour called the Guitar Trio (G3) Is My Life North America Tour, which was accompanied by the original film by Robert Longo that was projected behind the performance, entitled Pictures for Music (1979). The sets consisted of local musicians from each city of the performances, including members of Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Hüsker Dü, Brokeback, Lichens, Town & Country, Die Kreuzen, Bird Show and others. A three-CD box set of these performances was released by Table of the Elements in March 2008. Chatham has continued to tour the original version of Guitar Trio in Europe and the US throughout 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. Rhys Chatham made his first American presentation of a composition for a one-hundred guitar orchestra in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, on May 23, 2008, with an orchestra comprised of local students and teachers, as well as many professional guitarists. This performance was the premiere of a new composition entitled A Secret Rose. February 2009 A Secret Rose made its first European debut in Rome, Italy at the Auditorium Parco della Musica. The American premier of A Crimson Grail Outdoor Version (2008) for 200 electric guitars, 16 electric basses, and percussion, took place at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Fesstival in New York City on 8 August 2009. RHYS CHATHAM (extended) Rhys Chatham was born in Manhattan in 1952. He came under the musical influence of his father, Price, a harpsichordist, and became a devotee of the work of early music composers such as Giles Farnaby and John Bull, playing their music on a virginal. Switching to baroque and Boehm flute, he soon became interested in contemporary music and began playing the work of Edgard Varèse, Luciano Berio, Stefan Wolpe, Mario Davidovsky, and Pierre Boulez. His immersion in the contemporary literature for flute led to his desire to compose. He began studying counterpoint and harmony at the age of 13 with Donald Stratton and Tom Manoff, who sparked his interest in serialism. While at NYU, Chatham met Morton Subotnick, who encouraged him to compose electronic music. Working under Subotnick's guidance at the NYU Studio for Electronic Music, he met Maryanne Amacher, Charlemagne Palestine, Serge Tcherepnin, Ingram Marshall, and Eliane Radigue. These composers, more than anyone else, kindled Chatham's interest in music of long duration, which ultimately led him to study and work with La Monte Young, tuning his piano in just intonation in exchange for lessons as well as playing with Tony Conrad's group, The Dream Syndicate. Rhys Chatham studied tuning under Hugh Gough in New York and William Dowd in Cambridge and supported himself during the early seventies by tuning the instruments of such artists as Gustav Leonhardt, Albert Fuller, Paul Jacobs, and Glenn Gould, to name only a few. His ability to tune and hear harmonics lead to his interest in making compositions incorporating the overtone series. This interest stayed with him long after the digital tuner rendered his harpsichord tuning skill useless. Founder of the music program at the Kitchen Center in downtown Manhattan in 1971, Chatham was its music director between 1971-73 and later from 1977-80. He was responsible for programming more than 250 concerts of living composers during this period including the NEW MUSIC / NEW YORK Festival, which was held between 8-16 June 1979, the prototype upon which the NEW MUSIC AMERICA Festival was later based. The NEW MUSIC / NEW YORK Festival included the following composers (listed in order of appearance): Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich Ensemble, A. Spencer Barefield, Karl Berger, Marc Grafe, Garrett List, Leo Smith, Peter Zummo, Charles Amirkhanian, Connie Beckley, Jon Deak, Scott Johnson, Jill Kroesen, David Van Tieghem, Michael Byron, Philip Corner, Malcom Goldstein, William Hellermann, Petr Kotik, Charlie Morrow, Barbara Benary, Joe Celli, Don Cherry, Tom Johnson, Jeanne Lee, Phill Niblock, Larry Austin, Joel Chadabe, Charles Dodge, George Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Laurie Spiegel, David Behrman, Tony Conrad, Jon Gibson, Annea Lockwood, Charlemagne Palestine, Ivan Tcherepnin, Jon Hassell, David Mahler, Gordon Mumma, Michael Nyman, Richard Teitelbaum, "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Laurie Anderson, Rhys Chatham, Peter Gordon, Jeffrey Lohn, Frankie Mann, Ned Sublette. Chatham wrote his first composition in just intonation in 1971. Following the lead of musicians such as Young, Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, Cornelius Cardew, and Frederic Rzewski, he then began working as a composer-performer with non-notated music of various sorts, which culminated in 1976 when he first started working with hard rock. Rather than simply appropriating rock music, he worked as a kind of "secret agent" in the field, becoming an active figure on the late-night rock scene in New York City. With his composition, Guitar Trio (1977), Rhys Chatham became the first composer to make use of multiple electric guitars in just intonation to merge the extended-time music of the sixties and seventies with serious hard rock. By 1982, Chatham was going deaf from playing too much loud music. He decided to make a series of fully notated pieces for the slightly quieter brass family of instruments. After awhile, this renewed interest in notation (and an improvement in his hearing) led him to return to writing for electric guitar ensemble; Die Donnergötter (1984-86) was his first effort in this direction. After a series of interim pieces he concluded this period with an ultimate work, An Angel Moves Too Fast to See (1989) for a symphony of 100 electric guitars, electric bass, and drums. Rhys Chatham's compositional concern has been to bring together seemingly incompatible elements and put them through a personal filter so as to vertically align them. During the seventies and much of the eighties, he devoted himself to combining the pounding, throbbing rhythms of rock with the aesthetic concerns of post-minimalism. At the end of the eighties, his compositional interest turned to making full use of the enormous freedom composers now have available to them by launching an investigation into the nature of this freedom itself. In the early nineties, Chatham began to focus his energy on playing trumpet and developing a personal "voice" on the instrument in the context of techno and trip-hop music. The result was a bit like a trumpet which sounds like an extremely distorted electric guitar. This music can be heard on his collaborative compositions with Martin Wheeler, NEON (NTone, released in May 1996) as well as ALTESSE (Virgin Records, released in October 1996) on the Marcro Dub Infection 2 compilation put together by Kevin Martin. A new Rhys Chatham trumpet CD was released in April of 1999 on the revitalized Wire Editions Label. The Wire hooked Rhys up with some of London's most fiery and dynamic improvisors: "stereo guitarist" Gary Smith, keyboardist/sampler Pat Thomas, bassist Gary Jeff, and drummer Lou Ciccotelli (of God/Ice fame). In 2002, the Table of Elements Records released a 3-box CD set entitled An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, Rhys' evening-length work for 100 electric guitars. After the release of this set, Chatham refocused on electric guitar orchestra and was commissioned in 2005 by the city of Paris to compose A Crimson Grail, his work for 400 electric guitars, which was premiered at the basilica of Sacré-Coeur for La Nuit Blanche, an all night arts festival sponsored by the city of Paris. Rhys Chatham's has recently writing a new composition for 100 electric guitars entitled A Secret Rose. PRESS QUOTES Rhys Chatham A Crimson Grail (For 400 Electric Guitars) In 2002, the master archivists at Table of the Elements made a crowning achievement: the beautiful An Angel Moves Too Fast To See box set by legendary New York composer Rhys Chatham. Holding three discs of guitar-orchestra masterpieces and a thick book of notes inside a heavy silver-and-white package, An Angel was dauntingly monumental, more fit to sit under museum glass than rub up against dusty jewel cases. But it also felt a bit like a coffin. After all, something this massive and career-defining-- it even ended with a new peak, the 100-guitar title piece-- seemed insurmountable. How could Chatham ever top it? Apparently the answer lies in simple math. If 100 guitars could sound so great, shouldn't 400 sound even better? In 2005, Chatham set out to test this theorem. Commissioned by the City of Paris to compose something for their all-night La Nuit Blanche Festival, he wrote the ambitious "A Crimson Grail (Moves Too Fast To See)." Gathering 400 guitarists (along with longtime comrades Ernie Brooks on bass and Jonathan Kane on hi-hat) and four leaders listening to his directions through headphones, Chatham led a 12-hour sonic marathon. Starting on the steps of France's largest church, the Sacré-Cœur, the ensemble ended the show inside, beneath a 272-foot ceiling. Nearly 1000 people witnessed this mini-miracle, while thousands more watched on television throughout France. Given the huge mass of bodies and sound, it would be unreasonable to expect the recording to replicate this spectacle. But audio limitations become a blessing on this album, which excerpts the performance in three 20-minute chunks. Slightly hissy and foggy, at times even claustrophobic, the record sounds like the abstracted essence of electric guitar. Sure, you can hear a chord here, a string pluck there, and the clicking of Kane's cymbal throughout "Part Two". But the lasting impression is that of a vibrant, shimmering sound-cloud. Chatham's ensemble creates an atmosphere that rises above individual technique, leaving concerns of who, what, and how far behind. Given that engrossing tone, A Crimson Grail's three parts are surprisingly distinct. "Part One" is the most symphonic, as guitar waves alternately gather into peaks and cascade into near-silence. Uncannily, the guitars climb separately in small shifts, yet invariably meet at each apex. As the echoes lengthen, the piece evokes a huge frozen wave, full of dense overtones and hymn-like hums. The cinematic drift of the Kranky roster and the power-drones of Phill Niblock come to mind, but the glow of Chatham's guitar army has a singular warmth. The outdoors play a role in "Part Two", as the sound of rainfall mixes with oscillating guitar tones. Once Kane's clicking beat enters, the piece becomes hypnotically metronomic, with two-chord guitars marching forward. Over that robotic lurch, dense sounds roll in like thunder clouds, adding a scary dissonance. The piece ends like a soundtrack to a horror-film directed by Stan Brakhage, filled with blurry shots that imply violence through abstract light and color. "Part Three" is A Crimson Grail's most direct statement, a buzzing, slow-burning drone that never wavers. It's also the closest to what one might expect from 400 guitars: a thick, solid wall of sound. But imagination alone couldn't predict the piece's undulating textures, a result of the massed intonation techniques Chatham has honed for three decades. At least the audience didn't seem to expect that, judging by their sharp, reflexive applause. Chatham responds with an encore of a darker drone that seems to create howls and screams. Whether those noises came from the guitars or the delirious onlookers is hard to tell, but one thing is for sure: This wasn't just a performance, it was a larger-than-life sonic environment. And A Crimson Grail offers the best panoramic snapshot one could hope for. -Marc Masters, February 19, 2007 "Like a demigod, (Rhys Chatham) set everything in motion and then disappeared, leaving us to figure out how to live in the universe he created." —The New York Times "For years Rhys Chatham's music has been more heard about than heard. While his work languished out of print, disciples such as Sonic Youth have gone to the bank with his sound. Chatham's sonic vocabulary is an inspired marriage of minimalist structures, rock cadences and glittering overtones obtained from massed electric guitars played in unusual tunings at crushing volume. (His) knack for garbling indelible melodies in gorgeous sonorities makes them as attractive as ever today." —The Chicago Tribune http://www.nonesuch.com/artists/rhys-chatham http://www.myspace.com/rhyschatham http://www.frankrosaly.blogspot.com http://www.daviddaniell.com