Mark Dresser solo in Austin March 11
Pedro Moreno
special Austin appearance by virtuoso bassist Mark Dresser. A relentless
explorer of the boundaries of the upright bass, Mr. Dresser has been an
integral part of the ensembles of such jazz and contemporary music
innovators as Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, and Tim Berne. In addition to
his 80+ recorded appearances as a sideman, he has released a dozen
albums
of his own solo, ensemble, and chamber music. For his Austin
appearance,
he will be performing solo, a format he has explored for more than two
decades:
Mark Dresser Solo
@ The Empanada Parlour
Monday, March 11th - 8pm
Tickets $8
"Mark Dresser is an inventor. He also may be the most important bassist
to
emerge since 1980 in jazz or classical music."
- Boston Herald, February 1, 1998
MARK DRESSER
Mark Dresser is a virtuoso contrabass player and composer whose
uncompromising voice and singular style has impressed international
audiences
since 1972. Not content with the traditional parameters of the
contrabass in
jazz and new music, Dresser has developed a system of custom
electro-acoustic
microphones to amplify his own unmistakable vocabulary on the
instrument.
This vocabulary is easily recognizable in over eighty recordings,
including
those with other luminaries of "new" jazz composition and improvisation
such
as Ray Anderson, Tim Berne, Anthony Davis, Dave Douglas, Gerry
Hemingway, Bob
Ostertag, John Zorn and others. For nine years he performed and recorded
with
the Anthony Braxton Quartet with Hemingway and Marilyn Crispell.
A coterie of world class musicians make up Dresser's current performance
ensembles, which showcase his compositional versatility. These include:
Mark
Dresser's Trio, featuring hyper-pianist Denman Maroney and multi-flutist
Mathias Ziegler; Mark Dresser's Force Green featuring Dave Douglas or
Herb
Robertson on trumpet, vocalist Theo Bleckmann, hyper-pianist Denman
Maroney, Phil Haynes or Mike Sarin on drums; The Modular Ensemble, which
performs his chamber music compositions and features violinists Matt
Manieri and Mary Rowell, violist Marius Ungureanu, cellist Francis Marie
Uitti, Denman Maroney, and Mathias Ziegler. He has written, performed
and recorded trio music for the 1919 German expressionist silent film
classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, (1994) with Dave Douglas and
Denman
Maroney. He composed music for the 1929 French/Surrealist film Un Chien
Andalou (1997) for keyboardist/composer Anthony Coleman and clarinet/sax
player Chris Speed. His current film project is a collaboration with Los
Angeles visual artists Tom Leeser and Alison Saar based on Dresser's
seminal work, "Subtonium," which has been realized in video for live
performance. A second work, "Sonomatopoeia" is being created as visual
score by Tom Leeser for Mark Dresser's composition of the same name.
Also
an animator, Sarah Jane Lapp is collaborating on a piece for Mark
Dresser's Trio entitled, "The Chronicles of An Asthmatic Stripper."
Mark Dresser has received a commission from Meet the Composer for the
saxophone quartet ROVA as well as a McKim Fund in the Library of
Congress for a piece for violin and piano. "Banquet" was commissioned
by
Swiss flute virtuoso Mathias Ziegler and "Althaus" by tuba virtuoso
David
LeClair with mixed quintet
In addition to his own ensembles, Mark Dresser is a founding member of
the
Arcado String Trio and was commissioned by the WDR Radio of Cologne,
Germany in 1991 to compose "For Not the Law" for string trio and
orchestra. Released on JMT, "For Three Strings and Orchestra," is the
third of five CDs recorded by Arcado. The repertoire of the Double
Trio,
a collaboration between Arcado and the Trio du Clarinettes included
Dresser's piece "Bosnia", which was commissioned by the Banliue Bleues
Festival in Paris.
Mark Dresser 's current collaborative projects include C/D/E, a trio
with
multi-reed player Marty Ehrlich and drummer Andrew Cyrille as well as
the
contrabass duo, the Marks Brothers, with Mark Helias. Dresser also
collaborates with virtuoso cellist Frances Marie Uitti.
Mark Dresser has twice been awarded a fellowship from the New York
Foundation
for the Arts and has received several grants for performer and composer
including Meet the Composer. He holds both a Bachelor and Master of Arts
from
the University of California at San Diego where he studied with
contrabass
virtuoso Bertram Turetzky. He is also the recipient of a Fulbright
Fellowship
for advanced musical studies in Italy with noted contrabassist Franco
Petracchi.
Mark Dresser makes his home in Brooklyn, New York.
QUOTES:
"He has proven to be one of the master bassists of modern jazz, perhaps
even
the most exciting....his improvisational fecundity was remarkable for
its
veritable ensemble-in-miniature, in which every orchestral maneuver can
be
deployed to advantage... Dresser's rhythmic mooring, melodic liquidity,
and
timbral hues showed how sanguinely he absorbs and adapts available
contexts,
emotionally and generically. The almost palpable physicality of his
pizzicato slaps and pedal plunging, the luxuriant tremolos of his arco
passages and refrains, were as identifiable as the calling cues we
associate
with elder bass paragons."
- San Diego Reader
"Mark Dresser is a bassist and composer of the highest order. On this
recording of his "notated" chamber music, he presents two challenging
works
that are artistically interpreted. His creativity and sonic
sensibilities
need to be heard. This project, the assemblage of musicians, and this
label
make an important statement about the creative process... The
performance is
intriguing, engaging and profound."
- Bass World, The Journal of the International Society of Bassists 1998
review of Banquet CD (Tzadik)
"To an experienced reviewer, it doesn't happen too often that the music
makes
you speechless. It might be due to the genre of the silent movie that
its
music is hard to verbalize, maybe the film itself can possibly describe
this
wonderful music. Mark Dresser not only pays homage to a great German
movie
and its expressionist director, Robert Wiene, but also makes a statement
about Neo-Nationalism and the current ethnic cleansing all over the
world...This is the masterpiece of a masterful musician..."
- JazzThetik on Mark Dresser's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"
"You've got to pity Dresser's poor bass-you wouldn't treat a dog the way
he manhandles his instrument. But the gnarled tones and vicious swing
he
tortures out of it are worth the abuse. In Dresser's slanted
compositions,
the jazz tradition is only so much grist for the mill."
- The New Yorker, August 18, 1997
"Mark Dresser awed the assembly with his compositions for solo bass-no
one
expected to be nailed to the floor by one guy with a four-string."
- Los Angeles Times
"Mr. Dresser, who constantly drove the group forward with his full,
wide-bodied sound, would solo, hammering strings with both hands,
creating
the sound of several basses playing at once."
- N.Y. Times
"In terms of the soloist/accompaniment dichotomy, Dresser explodes the
notion
of the bass as both single instrument and back-up instrument. His arco
work
takes on a progressively seamless singing quality while occasional
overdubs
allow pizzicato dancing around the bowed slipstream. Thus glissandi and
pitch shifts are pocked and plunked and shoved in a sometimes delirious
display of talent. But even when it's Dresser alone, sans overdubs,
he's a
feverish, fast-moving string group unto himself...I count this among the
best
anti-virtuosic solo recordings to date. Anti-virtuosic playing is, of
course, historically a function of interrogating the inherited history
of
technique and beauty, and here Dresser presents an alarmingly tense and
exciting technique and a sense of beauty as something not simply or
clearly
or calmly related but rather something for which all involved must
work."
- Andrew Bartlett - 5/4 Magazine (Review of INVOCATION on Knitting
Factory
Works)
"Dresser has a heroic sound and his double-, triple-, and
quadruple-stopped
glisses are stunning. ...he should sustain his position as one of the
few
virtuosos of so-called avant-garde jazz."
- Village Voice on the premier of "The Banquet" September '95
"Mark Dresser, who is able to jump over the highest stylistic walls in a
single bound, wrote a concerto that shows where this journey between
contemporary classical music and jazz can go. Dresser wrote a piece of
music
that fits like a glove to the astonishing soloist, Matthias Ziegler.
This
piece has many element which you can't find anymore in "serious" music
like
drama, entertainment, rhythmic playfulness, variety of sound, and room
for
individual improvisational development."
- Neue Zurcher Zeitung
"Mark Dresser's Promethean bass-playing powers one of the heaviest bands
on
the scene...Dresser consistently astonishes with his range of ideas and
effects, not to mention his towering beat."
- Wire Magazine
"Mr. Dresser, a bassist of dexterity and power, isn't content with dryly
cerebral experimentation or some anachronistic idea of euphoria through
tumult. He wants it all: timbral experimentation, pulsating rhythm,
strong melodies, imaginative strategies for composing. ...with his
well-rehearsed group, swinging four-way cohesion was always the issue."
- New York Times, May 30, 1997
"Mark Dresser first came to national attention in 1985 as the bass
player for
Anthony Braxton's now legendary quartet. The band broke up in 1994 but
Dresser continues to further the vocabulary of the acoustic bass through
his
eccentric and radical advancements in technique."
- Jazziz-The 150 Most Influential Artists who Moved Jazz's Changes Since
1983. September, 1988
Pedro Moreno
Epistrophy Arts
http://www.epistrophyarts.org