Grazyna Auguscik's Orkestar Universale: with special guests Paulinho Garcia and Goran Ivanovic
Grazyna Auguscik's pristine vocals have long been a perfect match for the delicate phrasings of Brazilian musician Paulinho Garcia's guitar. Polish-born Auguscik (pictured) has been exploring the music of many countries throughout her career. This concert brings virtuoso Polish accordionist Jarek Bester together with Auguscik, Garcia and Serbian guitarist Goran Ivanovic to perform original compositions using native instruments from three continents.
As a major drummer of contemporary Afro-American music, Hamid Drake has been the most sought after polyrhythmician employed by all free jazz leaders (Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Fred Anderson, Peter Br�tzmann�) and has become one of the key personalities of jazz. Influenced by jazz as much as any other world musics (from traditional Indian or Afro-Cuban to African and Creole musics), Drake has acquired a matchless style combining Elvin Jones, Milford Graves and Ed Blackwell�s inputs. Joined here by an informal saxophone quartet made of talented and bold players coming partly from Chicago (Greg Ward and Ernest Dawkins) and the New York free scene (Daniel Carter and Sabir Mateen), Hamid Drake, composer and director of collective moods, offers a successively harsh, melodic, expressionist and meditative music, at the same time deeply lyrical and made of dazing rhythm grooves coming from the depth of universal Black soul.
Co-founder and first president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM), Muhal Richard Abrams not only is one of the genuine legends of the Chicago music scene but also one of the secretly more influent personalities in the history of modern jazz. Strongly influenced by blues, rhythm�n�blues and the tormented virtuoso lyricism of the most recent Bud Powell, this original piano player proved as years went by an exceptional composer with an extensive and ambitious songbook, both lyric and abstract, as much influenced by jazz (from boogie-woogie to bebop, from ragtime to vanguard) as 20th century composers (Messiaen, Webern). Alone facing his keyboard, Abrams takes us to another musical dimension. It�s as if in the depth of his personal expression lay some kind of anonymous voice telling the universality of belonging somewhere, being rooted some place, some times, in a soil � linked to the others with a brilliant modernity as the generations go by.
