News & Updates — avant-garde

Has anybody ever said a bad thing about Eric Dolphy? One of the most respected jazz artists, even if he is not exactly a household name to casual jazz fans, any serious jazz head loves him, as well as every single musician that ever came into contact with him. He was known to give his last dollar to struggling musicians in gestures of kindness and compassion. He even gave so much to the groups he worked in that his own career as a leader was woefully brief. He was an amazing composer, improviser, alto saxophonist, flautist and pioneered the use...

The influential ambient/electronic/new age composer Edgar Froese, the figurehead for experimental krautrock band Tangerine Dream, was born on this day (D-Day in '44). He lost his father to the Nazis, but his mother and he ended up in West Berlin after the war. When Froese started Tangerine Dream in '67, he was interested in surrealism, dada, old poetry and free-form rock. Over the course of several decades (and line-up changes) the band would help to define krautrock, new age, ambient, electronica, going from Jimi Hendrix & Pink Floyd-inspired psychedelia to environmental music, classical passages to space rock, soundtracks for film...

We recently lost Pauline Oliveros, pioneering electronic and meditative music composer, educator and accordionist. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, founded in 1962 alongside Morton Subotnick, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and others. A native of Houston, she started playing accordion as a young child, deciding pretty quickly that music would be her life. She played French horn and tuba as well and started working with musique-concréte in the mid-'50s. She later re-tuned her accordion and added digital electronics to her set up. Her early electronic works from the late '60s, Alien Bog and Beautful...

Best known as the older brother of saxophonist Wayne, Alan Shorter was a fiercely unique free jazz trumpeter and flugelhorn player in the '60s and early '70s. From Newark NJ, he was playing in a bebop group as a youngster with Wayne, Grachan Moncur III and Walter Davis Jr. He spent some time in the Army and joined the fire music scene, cutting sessions with Archie Shepp, Alan Silva, Marion Brown, Francois Tusques, the Full Moon Ensemble and his brother's 1965 album The All-Seeing Eye. (In fact, he was composer of "Mephistopheles" on said album). He made two underground classics...

Happy birthday to the Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis, he of a million ideas. From chamber ensemble to reeds to percussion to electronics, game theory, computers, orchestral and architectural, he was, in my opinion, one of the most exciting and relevant on the so-called 20th Century composers. He took up arms against the British during the Greek civil war and had half his face blown off, losing an eye. After that he was exiled to France, as he was sentenced to death in Greece for his Communist actions. He sought to utilize his expertise in mathematics and architecture in his music...