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Event Description
" Try not to understand, just surrender to the playing and sit back to revel in his creativity, his skill and his subtlety. Bursting with a new kind of jazz, glorying with invention. ”
Jazz Views
EARLY SHOW - Doors 6:30pm / Music 7pm
LATE SHOW - Doors 9pm / Music 9:30pm
The Cooler at The Complex, 12 Mary's Abbey, Dublin 7
US pianist Craig Taborn will return to Ireland for an intimate show in the micro-venue at The Cooler, a unique opportunity for Irish audiences to come up close and personal to this extraordinary musician.
Born in Detroit in 1970, Craig Taborn studied at the University of Michigan. He first came to wider attention in the groups of saxophonist James Carter. His first ECM appearance was with Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory on the album Nine To Get Ready (recorded 1997).
Over the last decade Taborn has refined and developed his approach, attaining new high ground with his 2020 release Shadow Plays. For Craig the recording is “part of the same continuum as Avenging Angel. Where that was a studio recording, this one is live, but that process of spontaneous composition goes onward.” The new album is a stunning live recital from the Mozart-Saal of the Wiener Konzerthaus, where the programme was headlined Avenging Angel II. In this fully improvised concert, Craig explores sounds and silences, swirling colours, densities and forms, creating new music with both poetic imagination and an iron grip on his material. His control of his craft as he unerringly creates narratives and structures from the hint of a revealed pattern, following where intuition and experience lead him, is extraordinary.
“When you improvise,” Taborn told writer Adam Shatz, in a New York Times interview, “you’re observing and creating at the same time. To make the next move, you have to get really close to what’s going on.”
“Free improvisation” can mean many things. For Taborn, in this context, this is not a matter of automatic writing or stream-of-consciousness self-expression but of keeping in focus both the larger frame of the concert and the concise statements shaped from the moment-to-moment detail of the music. “A lot of my interests revolve around trying to extend the boundaries you can create in…” Taborn has noted. “Rather than simply free-flowing as I travel from Point A to Point B, I am really trying to construct and to organize the material as it emerges, in real time. And what is created in this way feels different to music using pre-composed elements.”
Taborn is a great improviser in any context, and highly regarded for his capacity to get to the heart of the music, whatever the setting. In the solo work connections to ‘jazz’ are not always self-evident, but in the flux of the piece retrospectively called “Conspiracy of Things”, allusions to the history of the music from stride piano onwards seems to flash past at lightning speed. In all pieces, ideas are explored, at multiple levels. Emotions too – tenderness and fierceness co-exist in pieces thoughtfully titled “Discordia Concors” and “Concordia Discors,” concepts that reflect the notion of unity through diversity. “I name the pieces,” Taborn said in a recent interview with Bomb magazine, “after they are finished and in consideration of their programmatic position – in a way the titling is the final stage of composition. And I intend the titles as invitations to extend the musical experience into other areas.” The inclusiveness of his work – subtly informed by music and art of many traditions – invites new associations and open responses.
Location of event
Venue Information - The Complex
The Complex is run by creative artists. It is the new Northside arts centre. Since February 2009 it has staged a rich programme of artistic and cultural productions, exhibitions and events in the Dublin 7 area. From our original home in Smithfield Square to Benburb Street, our new permanent premises is located at Little Green Street, next to the old Fruit and Vegetable Market.
The new arts centre features nine artist’s studios as well as two performance areas, rehearsal and exhibition space.