1pm Sunday, March 9th at Willimantic Records, a free show with donations to the artists encouraged.
Photo by Beth O'Brien
Craig Shepard writes
music related to stillness. The experience of listening to his music has
been compared to listening to the sound of falling snow. He writes
mostly for acoustic instruments with rich tonal qualities.
His
music is published by Edition Wandelweiser. It has been called "spare,
elegant" (Steve Smith, Time Out New York) "touchingly beautiful"
(Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Berliner Zeitung) and "truly invulnerable" (Martin
Preisser, St-Galler Tagblatt). It has been featured at the Huddersfield
Contemporary Music Festival, Moments
Musicaux Aarau, the Akademie der Künste Berlin, the Kunstraum
Düsseldorf, Experimental Intermedia New York, The Stone NYC, Issue
Project Room Brooklyn, Real Art Ways in Hartford, the Deep Listening
Center in Kingston, New York, and throughout Europe and the United
States.
Mr. Shepard has received commissions from the
Musikpodium der Stadt Zürich, Quartour Bozzini, the Masanti/Parkinson
Duo, the Kantorei der Stadtkirche Solothurn and the Gesellschaft für
Literatur, Musik und Kunst Romanshorn.
As a trombonist, he has
performed with Christian Wolff, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company,Jürg
FreyCollegium Novum Zürich and many others. He has played on recordings
with the Vokal Ensemble München and with Burkhard Schlothaur.
At the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (Zurich University of the Arts),
Mr. Shepard served as a lecturer and listening researcher. A paper
detailing the results of his work has been published in the
Schweizerische Musikzeitung.
From 2001 to 2005, he studied
sacbut with Ulrich Eichenberger. In 1998, he graduated with a Bachelor
of Music, magna cum laude, from Northwestern University, where he
studied trombone with Frank Crisafulli and composition with Michael
Pisaro, Amnon Wolman, and Alan Stout.
He lives in Brooklyn, New York. - www.craigshepard.net
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Alto and tenor saxophonist Paul Flaherty is New England's
purveyor of the ecstatic jazz pulse. Even before his 1978 debut
Flaherty remained unshakable in the pursuit of soul healing and demon
dashing through freedom music. That first record, In the Midst of Chaos
was cut with his local clan, under the banner Orange. For the next 20
years Flaherty remained exclusively in the great North East and
recording over a dozen blasting, freely improvised albums with drummer
Randall Colbourne, and others, for Cadence and their own Zaabway
imprint. Wet Paint is Flaherty's current imprint for the occasional
self-release.
Since 2001 Flaherty's notoriety has risen in tandem with his
hyper-acclaimed duo with drummer Chris Corsano and regular group work
with Dream/Aktion Unit (with Jim O'Rourke and Thurston Moore), Cold
Bleak Heat (with Greg Kelley and Matt Heyner), Spencer Yeh, Dredd Foole,
Joe McPhee, Steve Baczkowski, Marc Edwards, and many others. - frontporchproductions.org
He's been at it since
the '70s and has become an underground champion of chasing the Eternal
Now. The subject of these sonic musings is freedom--freedom from the
constraints of traditional harmonic, melodic, and compositional
forms--freedom to go, baby, go wherever the Spirit takes him.
-- Farrell Lowe, All About Jazz
Often incredibly
descriptive with myriad small details fleshing out the larger picture;
other times he paints in bigger broader strokes. This is New England
improvisational saxophonist Paul Flaherty's second solo album... He
coaxes sounds out of his alto and soprano saxophones that I have never
heard before, and besides his musical inventiveness, he's got more raw
energy than three people.
-- George Parsons, Dream Magazine on Flaherty's 2006 solo album Whirl of Nothingness
