Music Elder Ones Quartet: Performance by Vocalist Amirtha Kidambi

The Music Department presents a special concert featuring Elder Ones, the New York City-based quartet that features vocalist Amirtha Kidambi (Seaven Teares/Elizabeth-Caroline Unit) and her compositions, at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, November 2, in Room 3 of Arms Music Center. The concert is free of charge and open to the public.

Kidambi and her collaborators—saxophonist Matt Nelson (Battle Trance/Tune-Yards), bassist Brandon Lopez (Nate Wooley Quartet) and drummer Max Jaffe (Jobs/Ava Mendoza)—are active in NYC’s DIY underground, improvised music and new music scenes, and draw from hip-hop to the avant-garde in their music, each bringing their own highly individual language to the group. The quartet uses composed material and loose structures for improvisation over a bed of Indian harmonium drones and synthesizer-like non-idiomatic playing on the instrument. Oscillating from worlds of Raga and microtonality to jagged rhythmic precision and musical intensity, Thyagaraja, Alice Coltrane and Stockhausen can be heard in their sound.

Amirtha Kidambi is invested in the performance and creation of music, from free improvisation and avant-garde jazz to experimental and new music. She is a soloist, collaborator and ensemble member in groups including the early music-influenced dark folk band Seaven Teares; Mary Halvorson's newest quintet, Code Girl; analog percussion and light ensemble Ashcan Orchestra; and Darius Jones’ vocal quartet Elizabeth-Caroline Unit. As an improviser, she has performed with Matana Roberts, Tyshawn Sorey, Daniel Carter, Darius Jones, Peter Evans, Trevor Dunn and many innovators in the New York scene. Past projects and upcoming collaborations include the premiere of AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) founder and composer/pianist Muhal Richard Abrams’ Dialogue Social; Darius Jones’ The Oversoul Manual at Carnegie Hall; a premiere of electronic composer Ben Vida’s work Slipping Control for voice and electronics with Tyondai Braxton at the Borderline Festival in Athens, Greece; the premiere of the late Robert Ashley’s final opera, "CRASH," at the Whitney Biennial; a Jazz Gallery commission for Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl; the premiere of Lea Bertucci's vocal quartet and electronics at Issue Project Room; a commission from the Jerome Foundation for her quartet Elder Ones at Roulette; and an artist residency at EMPAC to record the group’s debut album. Kidambi is also a 2016-2017 Asian Cultural Council Fellow, and will travel to India for intensive study in Carnaticvocal music in the summer of 2017.

For more information contact Professor Jason Robinson (jrobinson@amherst.edu).