$10 Cover @ the Door / Start 7:30pm / Doors 7pm
"Recent explorations of solo piano. Originals and standards and recompositions. My focus has shifted onto this in the last couple of years."
Pianist and composer Anthony Coleman has been one of the key figures of New York music for nearly four decades. His work bridges the gap between Composition and Improvisation, Uptown and Downtown, and spans a wide range of genres and practices including Free Improvisation, Jazz, Jewish music (of various types), and Contemporary Chamber Music.
At the dawn of the 1980s, after earning a Masters Degree in Composition from the Yale School of Music, Coleman immersed himself in New York City’s forward-thinking circle of genre-confounding composers and improvisers that would come to be known as the Downtown Scene. The first two records Coleman played on, Glenn Branca’s Lesson No. 1 and John Zorn’s Archery, are classics of a then-emerging avant garde.
Balancing a powerful sense of structural logic and expressionistic color, Coleman has had a prolific career as a composer. His works have been commissioned by the Concert Artist Guild, the Jerome Foundation, the Ruhrtriennale, the Festival Banlieues Blues, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars, among others. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, etc.
He has presented his own work at the Sarajevo Jazz Festival (Bosnia), North Sea Jazz Festival (Holland), Saalfelden Festival (Austria), and the Krakow and Vienna Jewish Culture Festivals. Ensembles led by Coleman have recorded extensively for Tzadik and include the trio Sephardic Tinge and Selfhaters Orchestra. He has also toured and recorded with John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Marc Ribot, Shelley Hirsch, Roy Nathanson, and many others.
Coleman has recorded 15 CDs under his own name, and has played on more than 150. His most recent recordings are You (New World) and The End of Summer (Tzadik). His Damaged by Sunlight (2010) was issued on DVD by the French label La Huit.
He has been a member of the faculty of the New England Conservatory since 2006 and has also taught at Bennington College, the Bard MFA program, and the Mannes College of Music.
Reviews:
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