Gareth Davis & Elliott Sharp: Canephora

stedelijk|music
Gareth Davis & Elliott Sharp: “Canephora”
March 10, 2013, 4 pm

Location: Teijin Auditorium, Stedelijk Museum
Language: n.a.
Entrance: Entrance price to the Stedelijk Museum
Reservations: It is necessary to make a reservation. Send an e-mail to reservations@stedelijk.nl, stating your full name, e-mail address, telephone number, and the date of the program you want to attend.

Gareth Davis: Bass Clarinet
Elliott Sharp: Acoustic Guitar

The Stedelijk Museum, in collaboration with the Gaudeamus Foundation in Amsterdam, presents a special concert by two remarkable contemporary musicians: clarinet player Gareth Davis and New York-based guitar player Elliott Sharp. Davis and Sharp will perform a number of songs from their new collaborative album “Canephora,” a duet of acoustic guitar and bass clarinet.

Davis is known for his various collaborations with Rutger Zuydervelt, also known as Machinefabriek (and the designer of the album “Canephora”), and Sharp is a longtime mainstay of the New York improvised music scene. Their collaborative album was recorded in a single day, April 5th, 2010, at Sharp’s own studio. This stedelijk|music afternoon will be a meeting of two like-minded musicians gifted with the talent of fine improvisation. Two different instrument sare played in such a way that we recognize them, but as trained performers of improvised music, it seems not to be their intention to range far beyond the normal sounds of their instruments. The great tension between the two players results in some highly exciting music.

More information about the performers:
Gareth Davis plays clarinets, the result of a somewhat impulsive purchase while window-shopping in Covent Garden, London, around ten years before the turn of the century. The serendipitous location of a rather wonderful (and equally important, rather cheap) secondhand record shop less than ten meters from the bus stop Davis used during seven years of schooling, combined with delivering newspapers on a daily basis, led to a somewhat eclectic, dusty, and generally unclassified taste in music. The results were performances and recordings ranging from classical concerts to newly written works by composers such as Bernhard Lang, Peter Ablinger, Toshio Hosokawa, and Jonathan Harvey. Davis has participated in a wide range of collaborations, from the vocal group Neue Vocalsolisten and the JACK string quartet to improvisational musicians Frances-Marie Uitti and Elliott Sharp, experimental bands such as Nadja and A-Sun Amissa, and electronic artists Scanner and Machinefabriek.

Elliott Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer. A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Sharp has released over 85 recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction. His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; Ensemble Resonanz; cello innovator Frances Marie Uitti; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack DeJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jajouka. Sharp has composed scores for feature films and documentaries; created sound design for interstitials on the Sundance Channel, MTV, and Bravo networks; and has presented numerous sound installations in art galleries and museums. He is the subject of the new documentary “Doing The Don’t” by filmmaker Bert Shapiro.