Her more famous husband Robert never composed a piano trio...until he heard wife Clara's astonishing work. Beethoven influenced himself, arranging his own widely lauded Septet for trio. As an award-winning composer including a 2020 Grammy nomination, Phil bassist Gregg August's work revels in the influence of Latin jazz. You will find yourself under the influence of musical magic.
Gregg August, bass; Todd Reynolds, violin; Christopher Oldfather, piano.
Program to be announced.
This concert is made possible, in part, with the generous support of the Brian Wallach Agency, White Plains, New York. Personal and Commercial Insurance since 1949.
Bassist and composer Gregg August spans the classical, avant-garde, jazz and Latin jazz worlds making him one of the most versatile musicians on the scene today. He is member of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (Associate) as well as the American Composers Orchestra, Westchester Philharmonic and Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Gregg is also the former Principal Bass of La Orquestra Ciutat de Barcelona and the Brooklyn Philharmonic.
As a jazz bassist Gregg is a member of the JD Allen Trio, having recorded 9 albums with the group, as well as Arturo O’farrill’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, with whom he’s won 5 Grammy awards. In 2003 Gregg formed his own record label, Iacuessa Records, for which he has recorded three critically acclaimed albums of entirely original music: Four by Six ( 2012), One Peace (2007) and Late August (Iacuessa Records 2005).
In August of 2020 Gregg will release Dialogues on Race (Iacuessa Records), the result of a commission from the Jazz Gallery and Jerome Foundation. An extended suite for a 12 piece large jazz ensemble, plus 3 vocalists, strings and narrator, the extended work deals with the subject of race relations in the United States. He utilizes poems by Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, Marilyn Nelson and others to create a musical conversation that is intended to help bring awareness and foster understanding on the issue of race.
Gregg has also composed many full length concert works, including “Una Rumba Sinfonica,” a commission from the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute and Earshot, which was premiered by the Buffalo Philharmonic. He has also performed and/or recorded with The New York Philharmonic, Steve Reich, The Bang on a Can All Stars, Alarm Will Sound, as well as Ornette Coleman, Chick Corea, Branford Marsalis and Ray Barretto. Gregg was on the Downbeat Magazine Critics’ Rising Star Poll in 2017, 2015 and 2013.
An adjunct professor at New York University and the University of Connecticut, Gregg has also been on faculty at the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA) since 2003.
Gregg received his bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music and his master’s from the Juilliard School.
Todd Reynolds is one of the unique voices to have come out of the Bang on a Can, post-minimal scene. Composer, chamber musician, violinist, and improviser, he is an uptown, midtown, and downtown musician whose collaborative list reads like a who’s who of experimental music. Perhaps best known for his work in the foundational era of the string group ETHEL, as a chamber musician he also spent time in the Steve Reich Ensemble, the Silk Road Project, and Bang on a Can, among other ensembles, which contributed to his unique voice as a performer and composer.
Today his work rises out of both the acoustic and electronic worlds as he continues his work on behalf of composers, creating ensembles, conducting, producing, playing, and recording. Sometimes touring with his own music as a solo act opening for bands like The Books, with whom he has also collaborated, he might also be found performing new work and even classics of the twentieth century with a chamber music group of his own design. He has collaborated with Meredith Monk, bringing together a string quartet for her touring work Songs of Ascension for BAM’s Next Wave festival. In production and performance, Reynolds uses a laptop as a constant second instrument, employing commercially available software (Ableton Live), along with his traditional violin, creating a hybrid “digital fiddle” to realize his and others’ compositions in real time. His own performance format, Still Life with Microphone, a site-specific piece of concert laptop-driven theater, tours as a duo residency with video artist Luke DuBois. Reynolds’s teaching residencies at universities across the nation include creativity conversations, nontraditional master classes, composer forums, and software performance integration.
Christopher Oldfather has devoted himself to the performance of twentieth-century music for more than thirty years. He has participated in innumerable world-premiere performances, in every possible combination of instruments, in cities all over America. The Westchester Philharmonic's Principal Keyboardist for twenty-two years, he has also been a member of Boston's Collage New Music since 1979, New York City's Parnassus since 1997, appears regularly in Chicago, and as a collaborator has joined singers and instrumentalists of all kinds in recitals throughout the United States. In 1986 he presented his recital debut in Carnegie Recital Hall, and since then he has pursued a career as a freelance musician. This work has taken him as far afield as Moscow and Tokyo, and he has worked on every sort of keyboard ever made, even including the Chromelodeon. He is widely known for his expertise on the harpsichord, and is one of the leading interpreters of twentieth-century works for that instrument. As a soloist he has appeared with the MET Chamber Players, the San Francisco Symphony, and Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, Germany. His recording of Elliott Carter's violin-piano Duo with Robert Mann was nominated for two Grammy Awards in 1990. He has collaborated with the conductor Robert Craft, and can be heard on several of his recordings.
Christopher Oldfather was nominated for a 2010 Grammy in the Best Chamber Music Performance category for Schoenberg: String Quartets Nos. 3 & 4 with the Fred Sherry String Quartet.