03/02 @ 8:00pm - Elliott Sharp & Andrea Centazzo – guitar and percussion duo

Two masters of improvisation meet  for a set of wide-ranging sonics and rhythmic extremes.

Andrea Centazzo:

An Italian-born American percussionist and composer, in more than 30 years’ career, Centazzo has crossed music genres and artistic expression forms, starting as jazz percussionist and improviser to become later a contemporary composer, a visual artist, a film and theater director and a multimedia artist. His discography includes over 150 LPs, CDs, and DVDs, almost all recorded for ICTUS RECORDS, his own label, founded in 1976 and still active after its 2006 rebirth in California. He has performed and recorded with Don Cherry, Derek Bailey, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, John Zorn, Henry Kaiser, Enrico Rava, Tom Cora, Theo Jörgensmann, Alvin Curran, Lol Coxhill, and others. Most of those musicians were involved in his Mitteleuropa Orchestra, a seminal 16-piece big band active between 1980 and 1983 in Europe. His most famous opera, TINA (1996), was inspired by the life and art of Tina Modotti. Two more operas followed, Memento in 2000 and Simultas in 2001.

Elliott Sharp:

Sharp is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer and central figure in the avant-garde music scene in New York City for over thirty years. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction. His collaborators have included Ensemble Modern;  Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Radio-Symphony of Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry, computer artist Perry Hoberman;  blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples;  jazz greats Jack deJohnette, Sonny Sharrock, Oliver Lake, and Billy Hart; turntable innovator Christian Marclay; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jahjouka from Morocco. Sharp’s work was featured in the 2008 New Music Stockholm festival with the premiere of “Sidebands”  and at the Hessischer Rundfunk Klangbiennale in May 2007 with the premiere of his orchestral work “On Corlear’s Hook”.   He is now woorking on a commissioned opera for the Bavarian Opera in Munich.  The documentary film about Sharp’s work by Bert Shapiro, “Doing The Don’t”, has just been released on DVD and screened at international film festivals