January 29, 2009
For immediate release

Contact: Sara R. Leonard
Concert and Production Manager
413/542-2195


AMHERST, Mass.—The yearlong Amherst College music festival Faultlines: Mapping Jazz in the 21st Century has unveiled its Spring 2009 schedule.  Highlights include a performance by Raw Materials featuring pianist Vijay Iyer and saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa; a performance by the California-based avant-jazz group Cosmologic; a networked multi-location concert featuring performers at Stanford University, the University of California, Irvine and Amherst College; a performance workshop led by the legendary New Orleans saxophonist Kidd Jordan; and a film screening of Music Inn - A Documentary Film, which explores jazz in the 1950s in Western Massachusetts.

The first two events of the spring 2009 schedule are as follows (both will take place from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. in Room 7 of Amherst’s Arms Music Center):

* A performance workshop with pianist Curtis Clark, Thursday, Feb. 5. Clark—who has recorded and toured with David Murray, Oscar Brown Jr., Billy Bang, Richard Davis, Abby Lincoln, Charles Tyler, John Tchicai and Han Bennink— “sounds like a combination of Bill Evans and Red Garland,” wrote JazzWord reviewer Ken Waxman, “with tingling arpeggios falling from his fingers.” He spent decades living in Amsterdam, playing with leading Dutch and South African musicians and recording a number of outstanding releases for Nimbus Records.

* A performance workshop with pianist Connie Crothers, Thursday, Feb. 12. Crothers was mentored by the iconoclastic Lennie Tristano and made her New York debut in the 1960s at Carnegie Recital Hall. She released her first record, Perception, for the SteepleChase label in 1974. “Her mastery of the piano is not to be gainsaid,” wrote Gary Giddins, in the Village Voice. She has recorded and performed around the world with the late Max Roach and has worked with Jemeel Moondoc, Henry Grimes, Roscoe Mitchell and Warne Marsh.

The Faultlines festival is curated by saxophonist Jason Robinson, visiting assistant professor of music at Amherst College, and celebrates jazz pluralism and experimentalism, featuring some of the most creative and provocative artists in American music. The festival includes concerts, performance workshops, talks and roundtable discussions, all free and open to the public, and all guaranteed to generate passionate debate about the nature of jazz and its relationship to American cultural identity. The events are made possible through the generous support of the Amherst College Arts Series Fund; Amherst College Departments of Music, English and American Studies; the Amherst College Mead Art Museum; the UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center’s Solos and Duos Concert Series and Magic Triangle Concert Series; and the Northampton Center for the Arts’ A World of Piano Concert Series.

For more information about events associated with Faultlines: Mapping Jazz in the 21st Century, visit the festival Web site at www.amherst.edu/faultlines or call 413/542-2195.

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