Ensemble and Guest Artist Concerts:

2013-04-18 -- Johnson County Landmark, Nathan Bogert, alto saxophone,

Dan Padley, guitar, Brian Smith, trumpet, and Justin LeDuc, drums

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7:30 p.m. Thusday, April 18, 2013 The Englert Theatre

Ensemble~oneen Johnson County Landmark - John Rapson, director Nathan Bogert, alto saxophone

April 18, 2013, 7:30 p.m. The Englert Theatre

Dan Padley, guitar Brian Smith, trumpet Justin LeDuc, drums

Street {2011)

Paradox (1999)

Mo'Town (2005)

Weather, or Not (2005)

Stompin' {2005)

Here My Go (2010)

PROGRAM

Nathan Bogert Dan Padley

Marcelo Cardoso

Brady Gramenz Jim Sherry Tyler Swick

Jonathan Birdsall Michael Jarvey

Brian Smith 'li Gobbo

Justin LeDuc

Justin Gingerich, Trent Harrison Ryan Smith, Marcelo Cardoso

Michael Jarvey Ryan Smith

The Night Sky and Turquoise Sea (2013)

Saideira em Bacio Geraldo {2006)

Blake Shaw Ryan Smith

Jim Sherry, Jonathan Birdsall Ze Gobbo, Ryan Smith

Michael Jarvey, Marcelo Cardoso

John RAPSON (b. 1953)

For the consideration of our performers and guests, please take a moment to turn off your cell phone. 7hank You.

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BIOGRAPHY

JOHN RAPSON is a composer, trombonist and recording artist for MoMu Records, Music and Arts, Sound As­pects and Nine Winds, whose work mixes ethnic and experimental elements with more conventional jazz forms.

My creative activity has consisted of recording, performing and composing in what has loosely been deemed as the "experimental jazz" field. This appellation refers not only to the contemporary techniques and modalities employed, but also to the practice of borrowing materials from non-jazz traditions. I took a keen interest in this field during my last years as an undergraduate at Westmont College and moved to Los Angeles in order to meet its practitioners. While in graduate school, I spent many hours meeting and playing with the innovative musicians that hovered around the Century Ciry Playhouse, a theater partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts that presented experimental jazz artists every Sunday night. It was here that I met a circle of musicians and lifelong cohorts who took their lead from the informal mentorship and examples of such heroes as John Carter, Bobby Bradford and Horace Tap­scott. In truth, I was going to two graduate schools.

On recommendation from relationships formed in Los Angeles, I received my first opportunities in 1980 to record with New York artists Tim Berne and Walter Thompson, respectively. In the fall of this same year, I received my first teaching post and, retrospectively, now regard it as the time when my profes­sional life began. I was writing compositions primarily in the world of western art ("classical") music while performing primarily in the world of jazz, yet incorporating improvisation in both activities. While continuing to tour and record with musicians from Los Angeles, I took up studies with Barney Childs who introduced me to a myriad of new compositions and improvisational techniques.

In 1984, I made a significant decision to unify my efforts in composition and performance by creating music that could successfully bridge the gap between tonaliry and atonality while blurring the distinction between classical and jazz. I received a faculty development grant to record my first album as a leader, Deeba dah bwee, for the Nine Winds label and composed all the music for the session as a performing member of the ensemble. This album led to a number of reviews and performance invitations that pro­vided my first international recognition. Many of the reviews characterized my work as following the path of jazz innovators like Charles Mingus and George Russell, whose improvisational approaches were intimately wed to their compositional conceptions.

Over the next six years, I received opportunities to play with recognized leaders of new jazz such as Bill Frisell, Herb Robertson, Tim Berne, Vinny Golia, Bruce Fowler, Clay Jenkins and Kim Richmond in addition to my former mentors, John Carter and Bobby Bradford. These performances included three successive trips to the DuMaurier Jazz Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia where my octet shared the stage with such jazz luminaries as Wynton Marsalis, Ornette Coleman, Ray Anderson, Jan Gabarek and Gary Burton. In 1989, my ensemble opened for HenryThreadgill's Septet, one of the critically acclaimed bands of "experimental jazz" at the time .

While continuing to record as a soloist for other ensembles, I recorded a second album as leader, Bu wah, in 1986 for Nine Winds and in 1989 received an offer from the German label Sound Aspects to record Bing, later recognized by the Village Voice as "one of the year's top recordings." My compositional studies

continued with Nobuya Matsuda, a former student of Elliot Carter and Roger Sessions, and with Henry Brant, the eventual 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner in music. From Matsuda, I learned coun­terpoint and the conviction to remove artifice. With Brant, I explored the possibilities of spacial distance between performing groups and the potential for intersection between differing tradi­tions. Mr. Brant showed great interest in the directions I was pursuing and prodded me to take the next step in my professional career. It was largely on his recommendation that I decided to move east in order to work with musicians in Boston and New York, and to study ethnomusicology at Wesleyan Universiry in Connecticut.

It was fortuitous to learn that Anthony Braxton would arrive at Wesleyan the very same fall as myself Borrowing his term, there is no "trans-idiomatic musician" with a greater reputation. Mr. Braxton has been copiously recorded and has had five books written about his music. In 1994, he received the MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius award "given to exceptionally talented individuals who have given evidence of originality, dedication to creative pursuits and capacity for self-direction." I had been familiar with Braxton's music for close to twenty years and had a few, sporadic interactions with him in California. After spending a year as Mr. Braxton's teaching assistant, I was hired as an interim instructor at the unexpected passing of Edward Blackwell, an­other jazz pioneer on the faculty at Wesleyan. I played in Braxton's ensemble for three years and, in 1992, was included on a recording of his music for the Italian label Black Saint.

I took full advantage of Wesleyan, learning to play musics from many traditions that included Afro-Cuban salsa, West African highlife, South Indian ( Carnatic) solkattu, Trinidadian calypso and soca, Brazilian samba and Javanese game/an. My performances included two separate appearances at Lincoln Center and another at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art with groups that were formed from Wesleyan connections. I also developed new relationships with prominent jazz musicians in Boston and New York, recording with Julius Hemphill, David Murray, Allen Lowe, Doc Cheatham and Loren Schoenberg. It was a particular delight to receive opportunities to perform in such venerable jazz venues as Sweet Basil and at the innovative sites of the Knitting Factory in New York and Sound Stage in Boston.

In the fall of 1993, I came to The University oflowa where I became director ofJazz Studies. In the following spring, I initiated a project where I recorded a series of free improvisational solos and duos with Anthony Braxton, transcribed certain tracks from the recording and crafted com­positional fragments from the initial improvisations. The compositional fragments were later recorded by a quintet in Los Angeles and fused together with parts of the original duets to create an album, Dances and Orations, which was released by Music and Arts in July of 1996. The reviews of this project noted how recent technology was employed to maintain the impulse and energy of improvisations within a fabric of crafted compositions. It allowed musicians from California and Connecticut to interact without ever meeting each other. This process spawned a number of new ideas for projects that I was to pursue over the next eighteen years.

In 1995, I was invited to be the artistic director for an experiment that would link musicians at three different sites in Iowa with musicians in Japan in a joint live performance via fibre optic technology developed in Iowa. This project, funded by AT&T and the state government, was

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created as a showcase for a new trans-Pacific cable that had been laid on the ocean floor. The work was used as a presentation at the close of the annual conference of the United States/Japan Association. I was commissioned to compose an original work, Sound Luminesce, that could dem­onstrate the full range of the technology and to arrange the contacts with musicians in Japan that could help us realize such an endeavor. Among the musicians that participated were Miki Maruta, a contemporary koto player that championed new works for the instrument, and Akira Sakata, a composer and saxophonist of international reputation. The event received full media coverage throughout the nation and was declared by Governor Branstad to be "one oflowa's finest hours."

In my second year at Iowa, I co-founded a twelve-member group of local professional musicians J called the oftENsemble, dedicated to the production of original work, in an effort to connect cre­

ative artists from Iowa with those from around the world. Four of these musicians have since come to teach at The University of Iowa, where they have had a clear impact on the growth and quality of the jazz program. In addition to the AT&T project, this group performed with visiting guest artists, such as Carla Bley, Kenny Wheeler, and the Rova Saxophone Quartet and later became the core of our UI faculty jazz ensemble. I continued to write for the oftENsemble, completing six new works and two arrangements for an album that was recorded in January of2003 as Mafficked Simulacrum and then later a live recording with Anthony Cox on the Clapp Recital Hall stage.

In the fall of 1999, I recorded the improvisations of drummer Billy Higgins and bassist Roberto Miranda in a follow-up project to Dances and Orations. The resulting album, Water and Blood, garnered further press that recognized the use of technology to unite musicians from geographic distances while yielding aesthetically satisfying performances. Like the photographs of Annie Li­ebowitz, these recordings are stylized "portraits" of prominent artists that place them in unusual compositional environs while striving to maintain their musical identities. Mystery and Manners, a third project with Brazilian musicians Vinfcius Dorin and Nene Lima, was released in June of 2011 on Mo Mu Records and under the SESC label in Brazil.

I continue to write works for conventional forces as well. Nineteen new works for jazz orchestra have been completed and premiered by Johnson County Landmark QCL) since I have come to Iowa, including the recording of Daydreams .from the Prairie. One of the pieces from that album, "Riff Bass Bridge Head," received first prize in the 2002 Julius Hemphill Competition sponsored by the Jazz Composers Alliance. JCL has recorded five albums since 1995 and our sixth is on the way to celebrate my twentieth anniversary at The University of Iowa.

JR

This program is supported in part by The Elizabeth M. Stanley Performing Arts Endowment.

Johnson County Landmark

Reeds Ryan Smith, alto & soprano saxophones, flute Andrew Allen, alto saxophone, clarinet Jonathon Birdsall, tenor & soprano saxophones Brady Gramenz, tenor saxophone, flute Brooke Hendricks, baritone saxophone, bass clarinet

Trombones Nathaniel Gier, lead Justin Gingerich Kyle Pape Will Tollefson, bass

Guests Chris Reichmeier, percussion Tyler Swick, vibraphone Rebecca Neal, flute

www ~i~i:~~ o,g/,'lusic -~' .. \ your support J 319.335.3305

Trumpets Eric Bush, lead Chris Thompson Meagan Conley Trent Harrison Jim Sherry

Rhythm Section Michael Jarvey, keyboards Blake Shaw, upright & electric bass Jose (Ze) Gobbo, guitars Marcelo Cardoso, drums

THE UNlVER.Sl1Y OFlOWA

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