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J&E003janetmaya
John McDowell and Emmanuel Vukovich. Photo by Janet Maya.

OK here’s my disclaimer right off the bat – YES!, composer and musician John McDowell is my brother. But much more than that, he’s the composer of the original soundtrack to the Academy Award winning documentary Born into Brothels and in his various guises and bands, he’s been heard at Lincoln Center, the UN, the Montreal Jazz Festival, and at many music, dance and theater festivals throughout Europe and North America. He has performed and recorded with artists ranging from Sting, Carlos Santana, and Krishna Das to Rusted Root.

John has been an organic, biodynamic farmer in Rockland County, NY for many years. Now, he brings his interest in music and farming together, thanks to a duo project with Canadian violin virtuoso (and also farmer!) Emmanuel Vukovich, winner of Canada’s first Golden Violin award. Operating under the name Music for Farms, the group has a mission to revive and sustain local organic agriculture and farming communities through the arts.

The duo will weave an evening of music inspired by an exploration of connecting opposites – such as in their original work based on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parcifal legend, the meeting of Eastern and Western classical music in their own transcription of Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin’s Swara Kakali, in their personal backgrounds of jazz and classical music, and finally in their own lives of practicing music and farming side by side.

Upcoming performances in New York and Canada include:

September 18 at the Heliconian Club in Toronto, Canada (As a tie-in to the Toronto International Film Festival’s premiere of documentary film Stolen)
September 20 at Novalis Hall, Angus, Ontario, Canada
October 1 at the Golden Key Society in New York City

The performers will also share some of their experience as farmers and present an excerpt from a film about music and farming entitled Bach in a Barn. Violinist Vukovich states “Originally, music, dance, and artistic culture in general were strongly inter-connected to, and a part of, our human civilization’s relationship to nature. This was expressed in traditional agrarian society through rituals in rhythm with the seasons – such as harvest festivals. As people have migrated more and more to large urban centres, artistic cultural life has tended to separate from agricultural life. We go to concerts in the city, and we get our food from farms in the country. This has often created a void and famine of culture and arts in rural farming communities, and a corresponding disconnect/abstraction in the arts.”  To this end, the proceeds from this event will go towards the creation of a foundation which works to connect world-class music-making and artistic culture with local sustainable agriculture and farming communities.

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J&E003janetmayacroppedAs a tie-in to the Toronto International Film Festival’s premiere of documentary film Stolen, this unique concert featuring musicians, composers, and farmers John McDowell (piano and African drums), and Emmanuel Vukovich (violin and African drums) will be held at Toronto’s Heliconian Club, 35 Hazelton Avenue, on Friday, September 18 at 8pm.

McDowell is best known as composer of the score to Oscar winning documentary Born Into Brothels and has toured with platinum selling rock/world music band Rusted Root and with singer Krishna Das. His world music band Mamma Tongue has performed at venues and festivals internationally. Juilliard and McGill trained Vukovich is the recipient of Canada’s first Golden Violin Award, as well as the Canada Council for the Arts Orford String Quartet Scholarship. As a member of the former Lloyd Carr-Harris String Quartet, which won the prestigious Fischoff Competition, he has toured throughout North America and Europe. Both musicians have collaborated on the sound track to the film Stolen which is premiering at this year’s TIFF.

“Music for Farms” is an international initiative which works to revive and sustain local organic agriculture and farming communities through the arts. The duo will weave an evening of music inspired by an exploration of connecting opposites – such as in their original work based on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parcifal legend, the meeting of Eastern and Western classical music in their own transcription of Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin’s Swara Kakali, in their personal backgrounds of jazz and classical music, and finally in their own lives of practicing music and farming side by side.

Program will include:
-Parcifal by Emmanuel Vukovich and John McDowell 
-Beethoven Sonata, Op. 8, second movement 
-Argentinian Tango pieces and Black Orpheus – arranged by McDowell/Vukovich
-Swara Kakali by Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuin – arranged by Vukovich/McDowell 
-Selections from film scores by John McDowell

The performers will also share some of their experience as farmers and present an excerpt from a film about music and farming entitled Bach in a Barn. Violinist Vukovich states: “Traditionally, music (and all artistic culture in general) was inter-connected with our relationship to nature. In agrarian society this was expressed most strongly in the various seasonal rituals – such as harvest festivals. As we began to migrate to large urban centres, artistic-cultural life began to separate from agricultural life. Today, we go to concerts in the city, and we get most of our food from farms out side of the city. This has often created a void and famine of culture and arts in rural farming communities, and a corresponding disconnect and abstraction in the arts.” To this end, the proceeds from this event will go towards the creation of a foundation which works to connect world-class music-making and artistic culture with local sustainable agriculture and farming communities.

Tickets are $15 (students/seniors) and $20 (adult) in advance (check back shortly for more information on how to purchase), and $20 (students/seniors) and $25 (adults) at the door. For more information, call 416 922 3618 or 773 484 8811.

www.heliconianclub.org

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Rashied Ali
Rashied Ali
Zach Brock
Zach Brock

Brooklyn based jazz violinist Zach Brock will be featured in A Memorial Tribute to Rashied Ali at Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleeker Street on Saturday, September 5th at 7pm

The tribute will feature Collective Language – Gregg Bendian, drums and Brock, violin (The Mahavishnu Project) with Jon Irabagon, sax (2008 Thelonius Monk Award winner) and Peter Brendler, bass – interpreting the music of “Interstellar Space” and late-period Coltrane.

The late Rashied Ali, born Robert Patterson (July 1, 1935 – August 12, 2009) was an American free jazz and avant-garde jazz drummer best known for playing with John Coltrane in the last years of Coltrane’s life.

Here’s more about Zach — his official bio: Continue reading “Brock Featured in Rashied Tribute”

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muccapazzahighlineMucca Pazza is Chicago’s amazing 30 piece punk rock marching band. Their performance on September 13th at Mercury Lounge is a must see!

More specific information on this performance here.

Mucca Pazza. Often mispronounced, seldom mistook. 30 grown-up dorks with too much energy and too little self-restraint, stupefying their audience with music that should never be performed by a marching band. To their credit, this band of misfits only has one march in their repertoire, a bizarre stomp played on the usual marching band instrumentation: snare drums, glockenspiel, sousaphone, speaker-helmet electric guitar, etc. Their other music includes zombie-mambo, snake-charmer-metal, gypsy-reggaeton and classical. Their completely mismatched uniforms and plastic bag pom poms dazzle revelers while their chaotic movements and strange behavior dazzle the police. The hardest smelling band in show business, Mucca Pazza is a sight to be heard.

“When was the last time you saw a marching band that just completely rocked? Until I saw Chicago’s own punk rock marching band, Mucca Pazza I hadn’t [seen one] either. This 25 to 35 member marching band nearly blew the Bluebird (St. Louis) down a couple of months ago. This was a really incredible night and an astounding performance.”
– Bill Streeter (Lo-Fi St. Louis, May 2008)

“…Mucca Pazza (Italian for “mad cow”) may not quite have 76 trombones, but they have enough other instruments to make a serious racket – including woodwinds, trumpets, accordions, strings, drums, cymbals and electric guitar.”
– Jason Toon (St. Louis Riverfront Times, February 2008)

“…[Parades] — some planned, some impromptu — are part of the Mucca Pazza experience. There was the time the band wrapped up a show in an Iowa City bar by marching out a door and down an alley. The audience followed, and the band had to march them back in. And there was the appearance at a record store — an empty record store — in Brooklyn. The musicians went into the street and started playing. A crowd of 200 materialized and the band Pied Pipered them back to the store.”
– William Hageman (Chicago Tribune, March 2008)

Mucca Pazza…proved to be a marching band that dodged any sense of convention. Yes, they dressed predominantly in uniforms, none of which even remotely matched… The ensemble’s preferences for gyrations and shimmies and a repertoire that touched on funk, ska, rhumba, Balkan folk, surf and klezmer music as well as covers by such unfathomably disparate artists as Nubian singer/bandleader Ali Hassan Kuban and Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich.
– Walter Tunis (The Musical Box, May 2008)