Photo by Cameron Wittig

Tune into 89.3 The Current at 4pm to hear Walker performing arts curator Philip Bither and The Current’s Mary Lucia announce the lineup for Rock the Garden on June 20 – this festival has become one of summer’s coveted tickets. Speaking of tickets, they go on sale tomorrow too, but Walker and MPR members get first dibs. If you’re looking for an excuse to join, this is as good as it gets. Oh wait, it gets better: Your ticket is free if you contribute at $60 or more; tickets for you and a friend are free if you renew or joining at $150 or more. As you listen to Mary and Philip playing songs from the bands, check out images from Rock the Garden last year – and picture yourself this June, soaking up sun and great sounds in our grassy back yard.

Lo Còr de la Plana | FMM 2008 | by retorta_net

“Lo Còr de la Plana … weave(s) a raucous, often dizzying, polyphonic, a cappella storm of ricocheting voices that sound both deeply traditional and contemporary. It’s overflowing with energy and irreverent spirit, feeding off often-satirical lyrics that recount ancient and modern tales about tricking death, lecherous spinsters, neglected brides, (and) bad influences…” – City Pages
Read more of the A-List article here

Singing in the disappearing Romance language of Occitan, the vocal and percussion ensemble Lo Còr de la Plana of Southern France not only brings a captivating ancient culture to life, but combines its rich traditions with 21st-century polyphony and subtle electronics.

Have a listen!

Tickets: Sat., March 28, 8 p.m., 2009 at Walker’s McGuire Theater

Cedar Cultural Center is co-hosting this event.

Interview with Jon Hassell from BBC Radio
BBC: Now, Jon Hassell: you may not know the name but you probably know the sound. A very distinctive trumpet sound, muted and swirling around in electronics and you can hear him playing on albums by people like David Sylvian, 808 State, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno and Talking Heads, an impressive list if ever there was one, or you can catch him on any of his ten solo albums where he plays an original mix of styles he calls Fourth World. Well, he was over recently from the States and we got him to take us through his eventful career and explain what exactly is Fourth World.

John Hassell: Well it began as a term some fifteen years ago to describe my interest in ethnic music combined with my interest in electronics technology. I studied with Stockhausen and with an Indian musician and an incredible classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and I began doing things like, he would sing a phrase and I would play the phrase on the trumpet, given that raga is a form that depends on curves, it’s shape making. It’s like making a beautiful shape and that resulted in a sound that was very vocal. But I was also deeply touched by Miles Davis and jazz. So I wanted to show that there was a music in which improvisation played a part but it wasn’t jazz, which in fact reflected the state of music in the rest of the world. It’s the only music in the Occident in which there is no improvisation in classical music. I wanted to take these three elements of Indian music, the background the tamboura, the foreground of the solo, and the tabla. I used those as a model but I didn’t want to have an association with Indian music. So I would create an electronic background, which might be made up of a sample of pygmy voices mixed in with a sample of Yma Sumac, a little bit of Hollywood orchestration behind her, something from the fifties, plus a bit of gamelan music from Java. Then my playing the Raga, Darbari. I’m leading up to a record called Aka-Darbari-Java / Magic Realism. This was an attempt to take the spirit of various places and then create a world that doesn’t exist.

WHAT THE REVIEWERS ARE SAYING:
“Almost all of the musicians I meet at the moment seem to regard Jon Hassell as one of the God-like geniuses of contemporary music.” —David Toop, The Wire

“Work of quite extraordinary beauty . . . This pan-cultural music swirls and rises like smoke . . . Hassell blends his experiences in such a way that the components—African drumming, Indian microtonality, Balinese tranquility—make a new palette while forfeiting none of the individual colors.” —London Times

RELATED LINKS
Jon Hassell Biography
Strange Magic Article on Jon Hassell from LA Weekly by John Payne

VIDEO CLIPS OF JON HASSELL
John Hassell and Maarifa Street live in Belgrade, Serbia

TICKETS to the Minneapolis show at Walker
Thursday, February 12, 2009 @ 8pm McGuire Theater

Wait for comments by James Everest, host of the Making Music series at the Whole Music Club as the Walker joins forces with James on two installments of Making Music in the Walker’s McGuire Theater on March 5th with Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors and May 7th with Jason Moran. More details to come!

More music conversations are on their way thanks to Justin and Mark. And don’t miss Kassin + 2 at the Cedar tomorrow night!

New York Times (Jon Pareles) gave a smashing review this morning of Kassin + 2 who is performing at Cedar Cultural Center Thurs, December 11th.

Here is a sampling:

“Their music was elegant as well as kinetic. Packed with ideas, the songs faced down private cares not by withdrawing, but by opening up to more possibilities: tuneful and clamorous, buoyant and barbed.”

“It’s a band from Rio de Janeiro that’s grounded in Brazilian pop and familiar with funk, rock and Caribbean and African music. And it made sure that noise infiltrated the supple tunes…for this band the noise is half the fun.”

“wistful melodies…enmeshed in layers of ingenious funk that could be dissonant or jovial”

“Mr. Kassin switched between gentle tunes and upbeat ones laced with Afropop guitars, carnival beats and siren sounds. Mr. Lancelotti…was the extrovert, clowning when he took over the microphone and building songs with riffs and quick chants. He started one song by clapping (joined by the audience) and slapping rhythms on his chest.”

Click here to read more
Click here to listen to a sample of Kassin +2

Performance Information
Date: Thursday, December 11, 2008
Time: 8:00 pm
Place: Cedar Cultural Center
Address: 416 Cedar Avenue South, Minneapolis
Price: $18 ($15 Walker and Cedar members); $20 day of performance

Click here to purchase tickets through the Walker website

Martin Dosh, Andrew Bird and Jeremy Ylvisaker at the Wilco Loft in Chicago. Photographs by and courtesy of Jason Tobias.

From NYTimes online article “Cheap Thrills”

“Writing songs and performing live have with time become almost the same process for me. The improvisation and conversation with the audience from show to show keep the songs fluid and alive. On the other hand, making a record is like a show that gets drawn out over a year or more, but with no cathartic resolution. When I’m in the studio things can quickly unravel and that’s not surprising. The audience has disappeared and you are given the attractive, but dangerous option to control everything. This is why I decided to start in Nashville with the basics – voice and guitar – because it’s easy to lose your rudder in overdub realm. Knowing that the mostly unadorned Nashville songs sound great frees me up to indulge myself a bit. Sometimes you make the song better; more often than not things can get over-wrought.” – Andrew Bird

Click here to read more.

Bon Iver who will be featured in Walker’s sold out Rock the Garden 2008 recently stopped by The Current Studio for a Minnesota Public Radio/ KCMP live session.

You can download from Live Indie Sessions here.

In a booth at a neighborhood pub in south Minneapolis, a slumped and bearded Martin Dosh is staring into his beer, tapping his fingers on the table, and talking about a coming performance at the Walker Art Center. It’s an evening devoted entirely to his music. The May 3 event has a title, “The World of Dosh,” and he’s effectively been asked by the museum to curate a tribute to himself, with special appearances by past and current collaborators like whistling indie-rock song-master Andrew Bird and underground hip-hop phenomenon Jel.

“He’s been this enigmatic, brilliant figure in the background,” says Philip Bither, curator for performing arts at the Walker. “He’s somewhere between the worlds of experimental music and pop.” Bither lists the genres Dosh’s music and collaborations have inhabited: contemporary classical, electronic, improvisational jazz, hip hop, and rock. “He’s somebody who can find links between all of those styles and do something fresh and intelligent,” says Bither, “and that’s rare.” Read more here.

- Jeff Severns Guntzel.

The World of Dosh at Walker Art Center

Saturday, May 3 at 8pm & 11pm

click here for tickets or Have a listen!

Pitchfork Media, the groundbreaking, national on-line bible for all things indie-rock gives a shout out to the Rock the Garden line up, the Sculpture Garden, and Walker’s upcoming Dosh engagement to boot.

“The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden– adjacent to the Twin Cities’ Walker Art Center– is one of the more beautiful spots in the Midwest (that picture doesn’t really do it justice). Featuring ornate landscaping and gargantuan sculptures from the likes of Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg, and others, it’s a surreal, almost magisterial spot, and sounds just about perfect for a concert.

What luck, then, that in celebration of its 20th birthday, the Sculpture Garden is hosting a pretty great one. On June 21, the New Pornographers, Andrew Bird, Bon Iver, and hometown heroes Cloud Cult will, rain or shine, hit the outdoor stage for the Rock the Garden celebration. Happy birthday, place with the big cherry spoon!

Oh, and if you happen to call the Twin Cities home or happen to be in town for a Twins game or something, you’ll have a chance to see local boy Dosh– along with Andrew Bird, Jel, Fog, and others– at the Garden’s World of Dosh concert May 3.”

Posted by Paul Thompson See the complete article here.

Click here for tickets to Rock the Garden and World of Dosh.

Andrew Bird, the headliner of this years Rock the Garden, blogs on the New York Times music opinion page.

How to write a song and other mysteries: Words Will Tell

“In about a week I will load up my car with amplifiers and guitars and drive to Nashville to begin recording my next record. I don’t drive much anymore and I’m glad for that except that I used to write a lot while on the road. Solitude, boredom, and the desperate need to entertain oneself are ideal stimuli for songwriting.

I’ll spend days at my farm creating loops with my violin where I record a phrase and layer on top of it, often starting with pizzicato followed by multiple string lines. This is a handy compositional tool I also use in performance. I can follow any whim and instantly hear how it works in counterpoint with other ideas. It’s perfect for someone who plays by ear and improvises as I do and who is too impatient for notation. This helps keep ideas fluid and ephemeral but with an instant gratification playback option. I’ve found that I can be completely satisfied for weeks by the simplest four-bar phrase repeating over and over again. It’s a fragile thing where your perception of it can change it completely. You can reconstruct all the elements the following day, note for note and go by physical memory but the feel can be elusive.” – Andrew Bird Click here to read more.

Have a Listen on his website’s A/V page or myspace.

Rock the Garden!

Featuring : Andrew Bird, The New Pornographers, Cloud Cult, and Bon Iver

Walker Art Center/Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

Saturday, June 21, 2008 | 4:00 pm to 11:00 pm

For more information / tickets click here

Andrew Bird, playing in Austin 2007 | Photo by Gary Miller