03.07.10 - 5:00pm

The Long and The Short of It – Alex Waterman, Jon Rose “Fences”, Hotel Axe & Miya Masaoka Trio

A mini festival of strings in all sizes, shapes and uses curated by David Watson and Jon Rose.

Alex Waterman

Miya Masaoka Trio (Miya Masaoka, Alex Waterman, Jon Rose)

Hotel Axe, an electric guitar group composition by David Watson with Roger Kleier, Byron Westbrook, Kenta Nagai, Grey Gersten and others.

Jon Rose, “Fences”

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Miya Masaoka

Miya Masaoka resides in New York City and is a classically trained musician, composer and new media artist. Pioneering the koto in contexts of improvisation, computer processing, new music and sound installations, she has expanded the koto to include lasers (Laser Koto), and has expanded the traditional costume while playing the koto — the kimono –to include responsive and wearable technology with thousands of hand-embroidered LED’s. She creates works that hover the boundary of music, sound, movement and light and that both investigate and reveal these fluid relationships.

Jon Rose

Those involved in new and experimental music often come to the metaphor of fences and borders in describing their work. Violinist Jon Rose has grappled with these ideas conceptually and literally. His project The Great Fences uses the 3,500 Dingo Fence that stretches across Australia and turns it into music. In 2009 The Kronos String Quartet commissioned Rose for their own fence piece, based on the standard #5 wire outback fence.

It has been 10 years since pioneering violinist, improviser, composer and instrument building maverick Rose played in New York. Apart from the subtleties of barbed wire, there will be a celebration of many string types and lengths – from violin, to tenor violin, to cello, to double bass, to electric guitar, to koto – with some of the finest players around New York. www.jonroseweb.com

Alex Waterman

Alex Waterman is a cellist, composer, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been shown internationally in museums, galleries and cinemas. He won the Tiger Award for Best Short Film at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2008 and took part in the Whitney Biennial that year. He continues to perform with his two ensembles: Plus Minus in London, and Either/Or in New York. He’s finishing work on a book on Robert Ashley, designing a garden, and writing a new screenplay about H.L. Mencken and the early 20th century circles of journalists and publishers in America.

David Watson

As a guitarist David Watson has regularly performed John Zorn’s Cobra. He has worked closely with Chris Mann and Ikue Mori, and premiered Robert Ashley’s trio composition “White on White”. He is a member of the long-standing but slow moving trio Glacial, with Lee Ranaldo. Recent guitar releases include Fingering an Idea (on XI) and The Shirley Jangle (with Lee Ranaldo, Christian Marclay and Günter Müller) on Kraak. “Hotel Axe” is part of an occasional series of multi guitar pieces inspired by other large ensemble experiences: pipe bands, drum corps, gamelan orchestras.