Music Performance and Poetry Reading with Ken Vandermark & John Yau
June 26, 2022 begins at 7:30 EST
Ken Vandermark will be performing materials he recorded for the album, The Field Within A Line, released on the Corbett vs. Dempsey label and John Yau will be reading his poetry.
The Field within Aline album cover
Ken Vandermark will be performing materials he recorded for the album, The Field Within A Line, released on the Corbett vs. Dempsey label
With his riveting performance in the inaugural Sequesterfest online festival in April 2020, Ken Vandermark inspired the Black Cross Solo Sessions. Already in the early days of lockdown, making good on the promise – or threat – of protracted off-road time, Vandermark had dedicated himself to the creation of a new book of works for solo reed instruments, which he debuted that day. The result of this watershed moment for the Chicago-based improvisor and composer was a body of works that reassert his seriousness and test his ability to reflect and reevaluate. The compositions, which are platforms for invention, are dealt with in relatively economical, almost stripped-down fashion, ringing with a kind of bell-like clarity and focus. Most tracks are on the shorter side, straight to the point, featuring the rippling intensity that is a Vandermark hallmark, but with an altogether reborn sense of purpose. Pieces are dedicated to filmmakers, photographers, and painters, musicians, choreographers, and writers, pointing outward from the hermetic situation of the pandemic to a network of creative icons. Recorded at home in the detailed chamber sonics of his living room, they offer a bulwark against adversity – the triumph of an endlessly questing mind over the terror of enforced stasis. Liner notes by Vandermark, cover art and design by Christopher Wool.
Photo by Petra Cvelbar
Ken Vandermark (USA 1964) is an improvising musician and composer who plays tenor and baritone saxophone, Bb and bass clarinet. He moved to Chicago from Boston in 1989, and has worked from the early 1990s onward, both as a performer and organizer in North America and Europe, recording in an array of contexts with many internationally renowned musicians (such as Fred Anderson, Ab Baars, Peter Brötzmann, Sylvie Courvoisier, Tim Daisy, Kris Davis, Hamid Drake, Terrie Ex, Mats Gustafsson, Elisabeth Harnik, Steve Heather, Didi Kern, Kent Kessler, Christof Kurzmann, Paul Lytton, Joe McPhee, Andy Moor, Jason Moran, Ikue Mori, Joe Morris, Paal Nilssen-Love, Eddie Prevóst, Mette Rasmussen, Tom Rainey, Eric Revis, Jasper Stadhouders, Chad Taylor, John Tilbury, Mars Williams, Nate Wooley).
His current group activity includes the bands Marker, Made To Break, Lean Left, Shelter, The DKV Trio, The Eric Revis Quartet, VWCR, DEK, his large ensemble Entr'acte, the ongoing Momentum projects; duos with Terrie Ex, Paal Nilssen-Love, Mars Williams, and Nate Wooley; and work as a solo performer. Ken co-founded Catalytic Sound in 2012, an organization dedicated to the economic sustainability of creative improvising musicians, and since then has been its director. In 2014 he began Audiographic Records, an independent music label. Since June of 2015 Ken has been co-curator of Option, a music and interview series held at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Half of each year is spent touring in Europe, North America, Latin America, and Japan; his concerts and numerous recordings have been critically acclaimed at home and abroad. Ken's activity as a writer includes liner notes for a variety of recordings; and contributions to the eighth edition of John Zorn's Arcana: musicians on music, the Spanish language journal, "El Esatdo Mental," and "Catalytic Quarterly." In 1999 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in music.
MORE INFO:
Facebook: facebook.com/ken.vandermark.5
Instagram: ken_vandermark
Audiographic Records: audiographicrecords.com
Website: kenvandermark.com
photo by Eve Aschhiem
Poet, art critic, and curator John Yau has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1950 to Chinese emigrants, Yau attended Bard College and earned an MFA from Brooklyn College in 1978. His first book of poetry, Crossing Canal Street, was published in 1976. Since then, he has won acclaim for his poetry’s attentiveness to visual culture and linguistic surface. In poems that frequently pun, trope, and play with the English language, Yau offers complicated, sometimes competing versions of the legacy of his dual heritages—as Chinese, American, poet, and artist. A contributor for Contemporary Poets wrote: “Yau’s poems [are] often as much a product of his visual sense of the world, as his awareness of his double heritage from both Oriental and Occidental cultures.” Yau’s many collections of poetry include Corpse and Mirror (1983), selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series, Edificio Sayonara (1992), Forbidden Entries (1996), Borrowed Love Poems (2002), Ing Grish (2005), Paradiso Diaspora (2006), Exhibits (2010), and Further Adventures in Monochrome (2012). Yau’s work frequently explores, and exploits, the boundaries between poetry and prose, and his collections of stories and prose poetry include Hawaiian Cowboys (1994), My Symptoms (1998), and Forbidden Entries (1996).
A noted art critic and curator, Yau has also published many works of art criticism and artists’ books. Reviewing Yau’s The United States of Jasper Johns (1996) a Publishers Weekly writer commented: “If you already have a weighty, profusely illustrated book on artist Jasper Johns but are still a little bemused, this is the book to buy.” Yau covers the career of the controversial neo-Dadaist painter, from his 1955 Flag to the 1993 After Holbein, deriving much of his text from interviews conducted with the reclusive Johns over a period of fifteen years. “In graceful, accessible prose,” the Publishers Weekly reviewer noted, “Yau deciphers the many art-historical sources within Johns’s art …[and] is capable of crafting the single phrase, such as ‘visual echo,’ that describes the activity within Johns’s work.” In addition to Johns, who he also wrote about in A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (2008), Yau has written on artists such as Andy Warhol, Joe Coleman, James Castle, and Kay Walkingstick. He has also collaborated with artists Archie Rand, Thomas Nozkowski, and Leiko Ikemura in poetry and art books like Hundred More Jokes from the Book of the Dead (2001), Ing Grish (2005), and Andalusia (2006). Calling Yau a “genius,” Robert Creeley described Ing Grish as a “brilliant train of wildly divergent thought.”
Yau has received many honors and awards for his work including a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, the Jerome Shestack Award, and the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by France. Yau has taught at many institutions, including Pratt, the Maryland Institute College of Art and School of Visual Arts, Brown University, and the University of California-Berkeley. Since 2004 he has been the Arts editor of the Brooklyn Rail. He teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts and Rutgers University, and lives in New York City.
Ox-Bow House is located at 137 Center Street, Douglas, MI and is wheelchair accessible. All programming is free and open to the public unless otherwise noted. COVID-19 policy: Masks are encouraged while inside Ox-Bow House, subject to change.