Shifting and switching from No Wave skronk to interstellar guitarist-as-drummer virtuosity, from stampedes of miniature Pomeranian Buffalos to All-You-Zombies heterophonies, Han-earl Park (박한얼) has been performing beautifully messy, joyously difficult, ambiguous and discordant improvised musics for over twenty years. Park is the mastermind behind ensembles including Eris 136199 with Catherine Sikora and Nick Didkovsky; Juno 3 with Lara Jones and Pat Thomas; and Gonggong 225088 with Yorgos Dimitriadis and Camila Nebbia; and performs as part of a duo with Richard Barrett. [More…]
Thanks to Catherine Kirby and everyone at the National Concert Hall for able and professional assistance, to John Godfrey, Juniper Hill and Melanie L. Marshall, the then coordinators of the UCC Music Research Seminar Series, who strongly supported Wadada’s visit, and to Mary Hickson, Chris Gaughan, Peter Crudge, Eoin Winning and everyone at the Cork Opera House. Kudos to Tony O’Connor and Athos Tsiopani for the behind-the-scenes help, and to John Hough for the videography and the technical support. Thanks also to Carmel Daly and Mel Mercier of UCC School of Music; Gary Sheehan of Note Productions; Jeffrey Weeter, Paul O’Donnell and, formerly, Jesse Ronneau of the UCC Concerts Committee; and Andreas W. Ziemons, Niamh Ryan and Louise Walsh at Music Network. Thanks to David Leikam of the Arts Noticed, Linda Plover of Blue Monkey PR, Eoin Brady and Bernard Clarke of Nova, and Sandra Quinn at the Evening Echo for their support.
A big thank to the best sound engineer in the world, Alex Fiennes, for amplifying the Cork event, and making the performance sound its best! and to Melanie for the conversations and unofficial roadie duties. Kudos to Marian Murray for jumping into the deep end, a special note of thanks Paul G. Smyth for stepping-up to support this project, and to Dennis Cassidy, Fergus Cullen and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly who came to the rescue when our drum-hire situation briefly went into tail-spin.
And of course a big, big, big thanks to Charles Hayward, Ian Smith and Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith for letting me share in their skill, craft, intelligence, musicality, generosity and sense of play (and their patience with this first-time tour manager): I’ll treasure Charles’ rhythmic travels to the outer reaches of an alternative-universe Caribbean; Ian’s brave counterpoint; and the spiraling, expert stacatto precision of Wadada’s trumpet.
Last but not least, thanks to all who came to listen and witness creative music in real-time!
A special one-of-a-kind improvised music performance by artists from Ireland now based overseas, and Ireland-based artists from abroad takes place on Monday, 4 April 2011, upstairs at The Roundy, Castle Street, Cork, Ireland. The event will begin at 9:00 pm (doors open at 8:45 pm) and admission is €10 (€5 concessions) at the door.
This is a rare performance in Ireland by Catherine Sikora (New York-based, originally from West Cork), a saxophonist with a striking, compelling sound. She has been described as “a free-blowing player’s player with a spectacular harmonic imagination and an evolved understanding of the tonal palette of the saxophone” (Chris Elliot, Seacoast Online). Joining Sikora will be cofounder of the London Improvisers’ Orchestra, trumpeter Ian Smith (London-based, from Dublin), and Cork-based guitarist Han-earl Park (originally from California). Smith and Park are members, with Charles Hayward, of the power-trio Mathilde 253, which will tour Ireland with the legendary composer-improviser Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith this month. The group will be complemented by composer, drummer, intermedia artist and lecturer at the UCC Department of Music, Jeffrey Weeter (who recently moved to Cork from Chicago) known for his innovative work in collaboration with Kate Simko.
about the performers
Since making her way to New York City from West Cork, Ireland to study abstract improvisation, Catherine Sikora has become a well-known face and sound in New York creative music circles. She has worked with Elliott Sharp, Eric Mingus, Michael Evans, Matt Lavelle, Jeremy Bacon, François Grillot and Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber, among many others. Her undeniably unique approach sets her apart from everyone else, even when surrounded by the most original and creative voices in New York City. Sikora is a contributing writer to the book “Silent Solos-Improvisers Speak” (Buddy’s Knife Publishing, Köln, DE) and is currently working on producing a solo recording.
Ian Smith has performed with Evan Parker, John Stevens, Maggie Nicols, Lol Coxhill, Steve Beresford, Eddie Prévost, Greg Tate’s Burnt Sugar Arkestra, Reeves Gabrels, John Sinclair, Harris Eisenstadt and many others. In 2000 he recorded his second CD as a leader, Daybreak, with Derek Bailey, Veryan Weston, Gail Brand and Oren Marshall. His own trio, Trian, has played the London Experimental Music Festival and the Soho Jazz Festival. He also participated in a reformation of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra in 1994. He has collaborated with composer Roger Doyle, winner of the Bourges International Elecro-Acoustic Music Competition, and he has been featured on two instrumental tracks by the hip hop band Marxman. He toured the UK with Butch Morris’ London Skyscraper conduction project. He cofounded the London Improvisers’ Orchestra and The Gathering.
Han-earl Park works from/within/around traditions of fuzzily idiomatic, on occasion experimental, mostly open improvised musics, sometimes engineering theater, sometimes inventing ritual. He feels the gravitational pull of collaborative, multi-authored contexts, and has performed in clubs, theaters, art galleries and concert halls in Europe and America. He is part of Mathilde 253 with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith, and has recently performed with Wadada Leo Smith, Pat Thomas, Lol Coxhill, Paul Dunmall, Mark Sanders, Matana Roberts and Richard Barrett. His recordings have been released by labels including Slam Productions, and DUNS Limited Edition. Festival appearances include Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology Festival (California), dialogues festival (Edinburgh), Sonorities (Belfast) and VAIN Live Art (Oxford).
Jeffrey Weeter is an intermedia artist and audio engineer. He has designed real-time video instruments and performed as the resident VJ for the Wake Up! series at Sonotheque. An audio engineer and theorist, he has presented at ATMI, ICMC and SEAMUS, and has published in Organised Sound. He has worked with the ensembles Powerpoint, Fire and Ice, Lucid Dream Ensemble and Cartwright/Moorefield/Weeter. Weeter’s work explores the relationships between media via performance. Performances utilize electronic and acoustic instruments coupled with video projection, expanding the dynamics of performance and forging a hybrid palette. Video elements characterized by manipulated and found materials combine with the music to form a mesh of shifting relationships. His work negotiates a shared agency between live performer and random or deterministic processes.
The real strength of the work is when the individual voices begin to shine, as they do on ‘Aachen’ for example—some savourable moments of interlining lines from Coxhill’s liquid fruit-juice sax and Smith’s horn. Park manages some imaginatively dissonant barbedly-wire phrases and false-harmonic scatterings from his detuned axe on ‘Similkameen,’ placing him very much in the Bailey mould, but that’s not a bad thing. Hayward puts in tons of hard work on his drum kit to keep up with the changing dynamics, and executes almost every paradiddle in the drummer’s manual on the long track ‘Kalimantan’ in his efforts to derail the collective train and steer the ship’s company over stony ground. Aye, the ingenuity and invention of these combined performances is impressive…. [Read the rest…]
This new improvising group… draws disparate personalities into one eccentric orbit. Han-Earl Park, a guitarist of Korean descent, residing in Ireland, is as at home in underground Noise as he is dueting with free jazz heroes like Paul Dunmall. Trumpeter Ian Smith is a stalwart of the London improv scene and drummer Charles Hayward is best known for his work with seminal post-Punk experimenters This Heat. On these live recordings they generate a surprising amount of heat. Park uses pedals to smudge and smear chords or rolls out strange robotic grumblings, a technician playing electricity as much as the guitar. Smith has a high, taut attach, like a more tuneful version of Donald Ayler’s pure energy. And Hayward… makes a good fist of playing freely…. Veteran saxophonist Coxhill rounds it out to a quartet for two tunes, making this a very satisfying debut.
