TATSUYA NAKATANI ナカタニ • タツヤ
Tatsuya Nakatani is an avant-garde sound artist, composer, and master percussionist. Active internationally since the 1990’s; Nakatani has released over 80 recordings and tours extensively, performing over 150 concerts a year. His primary focus is his solo work and his large ensemble project, the Nakatani Gong Orchestra. With his activity in the new music, improvisation and experimental music scenes, Nakatani has a long history of collaboration. He teaches master classes and lectures at universities and music conservatories around the world. Originally from Osaka, Japan, he makes his home in the small desert town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
Nakatani creates his distinctive music centred around his adapted bowed gong, supported by an array of drums, gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, metal objects, bells, and various sticks and bows to create an intense, intuitively primitive, expressive music of unusually strong spirit that defies category or genre. In consort with his hand carved Kobo Bows, it is an instrument he has spent decades developing. A master of extended percussion techniques, it can be difficult to understand the genesis of his sounds. Nakatani approaches his orchestral project (NGO) as an arrangement of formations of vibrations, incorporated in shimmering layers of silence and texture. Within this contemporary work, one can still recognize the dramatic pacing, formal elegance and space (ma) felt in traditional Japanese music. His music is based in improvised/ experimental music, jazz, free jazz, rock, and noise, yet retains the sense of space and beauty found in traditional Japanese folk music.
GHOST VARIABLES
Ghost Variables is a new improvising ensemble based in Hamilton, Ontario. Do they play jazz? The US scholar Thomas Brothers calls “jazz music” the interaction of the fixed, and the variable. Ghost Variables, as a musical ensemble, inhabit the region between the fixed – what is known, and the variable – what is yet to be played.
Connor Bennett is known as a saxophonist with such ensembles as Blue Moss, Ylang Ylang, and Tidal Pool, and as a designer of custom mouthpieces. David Lee is a veteran bassist in Canadian ensembles for many years, and percussionist Mike Hansen is a busy sound and installation artist who has recorded with Michael Snow, Glen Hall, and John Butcher. Chris Palmer, busy in Hamilton as a guitar teacher and choral soloist, has played with Lee as onstage musicians in the acclaimed Sky Gilbert play “Pat and Skee” at Theatre Aquarius, and joins Lee-Palmer-Bennett on their CD “The Phantom Hunter.” [Absent: Reedsman Gary Barwin, performance poet with a PhD in musical composition.]
Tickets $17 via e-transfer to cem [at] zulapresents [dot] org or $20 door
Lee / Palmer / Bennett photo by David Lobato