Perspectives 2017

PERSPECTIVES LAURIE ANDERSON ∕ CARLA BLEY ∕ KAMASI WASHINGTON ∕ KRISTIN HERSH ∕ MAGNETIC FIELDS - 50 SONG MEMOIR ∕ JENNY HVAL ∕ DONNY MCCASLIN GROUP ∕ IN MY MIND: THELONIOUS MONK AT TOWN HALL 1959 ∕ AN EVENING WITH PAT METHENY ∕ BRAD MEHLDAU TRIO ∕ JORDI SAVALL AND HESPÈRION XXI: HOMAGE TO SYRIA 01 417 0000 nch.ie

PERSPECTIVES LAURIE ANDERSON RESIDENCY Language of the Future Saturday 13 May 2017, 8pm Talking Book Sunday 14 May 2017, 8pm Improv!

Monday 15 May 2017, 8pm CARLA BLEY Thursday 25 May 2017, 8pm KAMASI WASHINGTON Thursday 29 June 2017, 8pm KRISTIN HERSH Sunday 23 July 2017, 8pm MAGNETIC FIELDS - 50 SONG MEMOIR Monday 28 August 2017 (Programme A), 8pm Tuesday 29 August 2017 (Programme B), 8pm JENNY HVAL Friday 6 October, 8.30pm The Studio

DONNY MCCASLIN GROUP Monday 23 & Tuesday 24 October 2017 , 8pm The Studio IN MY MIND: THELONIOUS MONK AT TOWN HALL 1959 Thursday 2 November 2017, 8pm AN EVENING WITH PAT METHENY Monday 13 November 2017, 8pm BRAD MEHLDAU TRIO Tuesday 8 May 2018, 8pm JORDI SAVALL & HESPÈRION XXI AND INVITED MUSICIANS FROM SYRIA, ISRAEL, TURKEY, MOROCCO, GREECE AND ARMENIA HOMAGE TO SYRIA ORIENT-OCCIDENT Thursday 28 June 2018, 8pm

Further concerts as part of Perspectives to be announced.

One of the seminal artists of our time takes up a unique residency which sees her create and debut three new performances as part of her ongoing work, The Language of The Future.

LANGUAGE OF THE FUTURE Saturday 13 May 2017, 8pm “The Language of the Future is a performance of stories and songs that aspires to look at and analyse current events in the light of how stories are told in media as well as in personal histories. Ever changing, this work gets its title from a story about a plane crash from the 1983 multimedia work United States that ends with the pilot telling the passengers, ‘Put your hands over your eyes. Jump out of the plane. There is no pilot. You are not alone. This is the language of the on-again, off-again future. And it is digital’. With the addition of film and electronics the evening looks at stories through many filters.” Laurie Anderson

©Tim Knox

LAURIE ANDERSON RESIDENCY

TALKING BOOK Sunday 14 May 2017, 8pm Talking Book is a collection of stories from Laurie Anderson’s forthcoming booking book All the Things That I Lost in the Flood that will be published in Autumn 2017 published by Rizzoli.

“A collection of puzzles, letters, snippets, grand theories, gossip and love songs, Talking Book is - among other things - about the relationship between language and loss.” Laurie Anderson

IMPROV! Monday 15 May 2017, 8pm “I have been playing with Rubin Kodheli for the last year and we have done many kinds of concerts - collaborating on a live show Songs from the Bardo with Tenzin Choegyal (which will be released on CD and vinyl next year), and evenings with stories and collaborations with musicians as various as the Kronos Quartet and jazz bassist Christian McBride. The sound we create together - a hypersonic new kind of stringed instrument - is a wild and free-wheeling hybrid of musical worlds. We’re excited to be joined by the wonderful hardanger player Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh. That will make a total of 19 vibrating strings.” Laurie Anderson

QUARTET FOR SOL DE WITT AND OTHER QUARTETS The Studio 6-8pm A durational performance of the quartet Laurie Anderson wrote for her teacher Sol De Witt with imaging alongside other quartets by Laurie Anderson. Performed by members of Crash Ensemble.

Cellist Rubin Kodheli (ko-thé-lee) composes music for modern dance, orchestras and chamber ensembles and contributed compositions to the widely acclaimed film Precious (2009). He also writes music for his band Blues in Space, a band consisting of electric cello, electric bass and drums. Mr. Kodheli has performed with many artists, including Dave Douglas, Henry Threadgill, Meredith Monk and Tom Harrell. Mr. Kodheli, who has worked with Laurie Anderson for the past year, recently performed a concert with Ms. Anderson and Christian McBride at Town Hall as part of a new series called Improvisations.

Arguably the most exciting and innovative traditional musician of his generation Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh makes music on a 10-string fiddle called the hardanger d’amore, and travels the world as a solo musician, in duos with Dan Trueman, Mick O’Brien and Brendan Begley, and as a member of The Gloaming and This is How We Fly. Free to ticketholders for Improv!

More events as part of this residency to be announced.

Tickets: €35, €30 1 ticket for 3 Concerts Package Price: €84 1 ticket for 2 Concerts Package Price: €63

CARLA BLEY Thursday 25 May 2017, 8pm One of jazz’s leading composers/pianists over the last 50 years, Carla Bley makes her NCH debut. Awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2016 on her 80th birthday, Bley’s trio with Steve Swallow and Andy Sheppard is performing with distilled, playful, and leisurely magic.

In the 1960s, Carla Bley made a name for herself as a jazz composer, penning tunes recorded by George Russell, Jimmy Giuffre, her ex-husband Paul Bley and others. It was the release of her 1971 triple album Escalator Over the Hill that announced a startling unique voice to be reckoned with. Featuring three dozen musicians including Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, John McLaughlin, Paul Motian and Linda Ronstadt, the jazz-rock opera is an excellent introduction to Bley’s stylistic diversity and restless creativity.

The composer, pianist, organist and band leader has continued to produce a remarkable body of work across almost 30 albums, in small groups and as the leader of her big band, often with her husband, bassist Steve Swallow.

Carla Bley piano Steve Swallow double-bass Andy Sheppard saxophones

“One of jazz history’s most iconoclastic figures” The Times Tickets: €39.50, €34.50, €29.50 10% discount for Friends of the National Concert Hall

KAMASI WASHINGTON Thursday 29 June 2017, 8pm Thrilling California-based saxophonist and composer Kamasi Washington has been described as the biggest thing to hit jazz for years. Having toured for over a decade with artists such as Herbie Hancock, Lauryn Hill and Snoop Dogg, most recently, Kamasi worked on Kendrick Lamar’s acclaimed 2015 album To Pimp A Butterfly. He now makes his NCH debut, performing music from his ground-breaking recent three-disc album, The Epic.

The Epic is a 172-minute, triple-disc masterpiece, featuring Kamasi’s ten-piece band The Next Step along with a full string orchestra and full choir. The Epic debuted #1 on several iTunes Jazz charts, including the US, Canada, Australia, Russia and UK. Over the years, Kamasi has performed and recorded with many of his musical heroes from various genres, including Gerald Wilson, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Kenny Burrell, George Duke, Lauryn Hill, Jeffrey Osborne, Mos Def, Quincy Jones, Stanley Clark, Harvey Mason and Chaka Khan.

Kamasi’s own band The Next Step is a modern spin on a big band, which includes two drummers, two upright bass players, keyboard players, three horn players, a pianist and a vocalist. In addition, Kamasi is part of a west coast musical collective called the West Coast Get Down.

Tickets: €36, €32, €27.50

KRISTIN HERSH Sunday 23 July 2017, 8pm Kristin Hersh returns to Dublin for this exclusive one-off concert. From life as the reluctant front person for renowned alternative group Throwing Muses, to her long career as a solo singer-songwriter, her lead in the power trio 50FootWave and her new career as an author of Paradoxical Undressing and Don’t Suck, Don’t Die, Kristin never stops creating. Her most recent solo release, an album in book form, Wyatt at The Coyote Palace coincided with an extensive tour here in Ireland and in the UK playing to many sold-out audiences and wide critical acclaim.

“Hersh at her starkest and most evocative, singing words of both comfort and confrontation” NPR "As memoirs, her albums are so intensely personal it’s little wonder she’s amassed a cult fanbase; as art, they’re arguments for the value of unapologetic individuality.”

Pitchfork

“Personal, tender and upsetting in equal measure” The Irish Times

Tickets: €28, €25, €22.50

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS 50 SONG MEMOIR Monday 28 August 2017 (Programme A), 8pm Tuesday 29 August 2017 (Programme B), 8pm Stephin Merritt, the master craftsman behind the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs, is one of our great living songwriters - a sardonic Stephen Foster with an expansive literary wit. Celebrating his 50th birthday and a new album on Nonesuch Records, Merritt and band perform two distinct programmes of new songs - one for every year of his melodious existence. In a spectacular staging featuring 50 instruments from Merritt’s formidable collection, the sevenmember band recounts his five decades on planet earth, covering everything from bedbugs and Buddhism to his conception by hippies on a houseboat in St. Thomas.

“Stephin Merritt has distinguished himself as one of contemporary pop’s most beloved and influential artists”

Each performance will be a separate programme. The entire album be performed over two nights: songs 1 through 25 on 28th August and songs 26 through 50 on 29th August.

The New York Times

The stage extravaganza will be directed by the awardwinning Jose Zayas (Love in the Time of Cholera, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter).

Tickets: €37.50, €32, €27.50 Book tickets for both nights (Programme A & B) for €55.

JENNY HVAL Friday 6 October 2017, 8.30pm The Studio Jenny Hval has in recent years made a name for herself as a recording artist and writer both in her native Norway and abroad.

Her polyphonic artistry is in fact seamlessly interwoven between musical, literary, visual and performative modes of expression. Her artistic voice is altogether present, accessible and obscurely complex at the same time. The New York Times defines her writing as “taking a scalpel to the subjects of gender politics and sexuality.” Her vampire blood solo album Blood Bitch was one of 2016 most acclaimed releases.

Hval released her first two albums under the alias Rockettothesky (an alias named after her very first recorded song in 1999, and slayed with the greatest pleasure in 2010).

She has since recorded four albums under her own name: Viscera, Innocence Is Kinky, and Apocalypse, girl and most recently Blood Bitch. She made her debut as a writer with the novel Perlebryggeriet in 2009. The less genre friendly Inn i ansiktet followed in 2012. She has worked on a number of collaborations, sound pieces, compositions, productions and performances.

"The Norwegian avant-gardist’s most atmospheric and filmic album draws on several traditions: vampire movies, the cross-hairs of art and pop, and the lineage of artwork made of menstrual blood" Pitchfork 8.3 (best new music)

Tickets: €20

DONNY MCCASLIN GROUP Monday 23 & Tuesday 24 October 2017, 8pm The Studio

©Jimmy King

Saxophonist Donny McCaslin and his band were David Bowie’s Blackstar band. They play music from Beyond Now, a highly anticipated album dedicated to Bowie. The project is deeply influenced by their extraordinary experience collaborating with one of the greatest artists of all-time on his final album.

“It was like a dream except it was something I never could have dreamed of” reflects McCaslin on working hand-inhand with Bowie on Blackstar.

McCaslin’s path to Bowie and Beyond Now can be traced back to 2011 with the release of his album Perpetual Motion.

Two subsequent albums Casting for Gravity (2012) and Fast Future (2015) released with his working band were directly influenced by electronica artists (covering groups such as Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, and Baths), which netted McCaslin a 2013 Grammy® nomination for Best Improvised Jazz Solo.

The once in a lifetime opportunity to work with David Bowie came after composer Maria Schneider, a long-time collaborator, recommended McCaslin and his group to Bowie. Schneider and Bowie were collaborating on the track Sue (Or in a Season of Crime), which featured McCaslin as a soloist. In June 2014, Bowie went to hear McCaslin and company at the 55 Bar in Greenwich Village. Soon after, Bowie began corresponding with McCaslin over email and sending music, forming a new collaboration and friendship that transpired through the recording of Blackstar until Bowie’s passing. The result is Beyond Now, which documents “David Bowie’s Last Band” as they were processing both their grief and Bowie’s distinctive impact.

“David Bowie’s Last Band” The New Yorker

Tickets: €20 10% discount for Friends of the National Concert Hall

With Jason Moran and the Bandwagon Sextet Thursday 2 November 2017, 8pm Marking the centenary of the Thelonious Monk’s birth, pianist and composer Jason Moran celebrates the legacy of the great American jazz artist. With large ensemble, film and archive recordings to delve deeply into the man himself using Monk’s famous 1959 Town Hall concert as the springboard, this is one of the jazz events of the year.

Jason Moran developed this tribute concert to Monk, though he came at it sideways. Starting from a 1959’s New York City's Town Hall concert which featured Thelonious Monk backed by a large ensemble he had rehearsed intently for the date. Then Jason kept digging. He found audio tapes and photographs from the rehearsals. "It's how to learn Monk from Monk," Moran says. He looked into Monk's personal history. And he assembled a new band to do much more than re-create the music from that evening: He wanted players to perform his original arrangements of those tunes, along with a video projection by David Dempewolf.

“… a stunning project — connecting with Monk beyond the surface of his music” The New York Times

Tickets €32.50, €27.50, €25

©Clay Patrick McBride

IN MY MIND: THELONIOUS MONK AT TOWN HALL 1959

©J Peden

AN EVENING WITH PAT METHENY Monday 13 November 2017, 8pm Twenty-time Grammy® winning guitarist Pat Metheny joins us on his 2017 tour around the world for “An Evening with Pat Metheny”. Recently inducted into the Downbeat Hall of Fame as its youngest member and only the fourth guitarist to do so after Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery, Metheny will present a range of music from throughout his career.

Most recently Metheny has created the critically acclaimed large scale work Hommage for Eberhard Weber and performed it at events in Europe, Japan and America. He also served as Artist-in-Residence for the Detroit Jazz Festival performing with his own ensembles, his longtime associate Gary Burton and a newly formed duet partnership with legendary Miles Davis bassist Ron Carter.

Joining Pat for this eagerly anticipated performance will be long-time collaborator and drummer Antonio Sanchez, who composed the score for the Oscar winning film Birdman. The score was nominated for a Golden Globe and 2016 Grammy Awards. They will be joined by Malaysian/Australian bassist Linda Oh who has been active on the New York music scene and British pianist Gwilym Simcock, one of the most exciting new pianists to emerge from the UK in many years.

Pat Metheny guitars Antonio Sanchez drums Linda Oh bass Gwilym Simcock piano

Tickets: €75, €67.50, €57.50, €45

Tuesday 8 May 2018, 8pm Combining technical prowess with a truly eclectic taste in music, pianist Brad Mehldau presents his first Dublin performance in many years with his long-standing trio bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard.

Over the last two decades, Mehldau has forged a path which embodies the essence of jazz exploration, classical romanticism, and pop allure. With the almost telepathic connection that only musicians that have played together for this long can boast, Mehldau leads the trio in seamlessly switching between genres, showing off the sheer breadth of music that his career encompasses – touching on elements of jazz, post-bop, classical and progressive rock whilst always managing to sound wholly like himself.

A prolific collaborator, Mehldau’s musical exploits have seen him work with some of the biggest names in jazz and classical, as well as artists well outside either genre - Pat Metheny, Anne Sofie von Otter, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Renée Fleming, Britten Sinfonia, Kevin Hays, Jeremy Denk and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. With his rigorous intellect feeding an inspired range of expression and intensity, no two performances by the pianist are the same, each leaving you eager for his next foray.

Brad Mehldau piano Larry Grenadier double-bass Jeff Ballard drums

‘Inside the music of Brad Mehldau is a conflict among rock, jazz and classical personalities.

Ultimately, though, the pianist has figured a way to integrate all three pretty seamlessly.’

The Philadelphia Enquirer Tickets: €40, €34.50, €27.50

©Michael Wilson

BRAD MEHLDAU TRIO

Thursday 28 June 2018, 8pm Early-music master Jordi Savall is one of the world’s greatest and most adventurous musicians. Over the course of his career, his invigorating performances and passion for scholarship has brought classical music to life for millions of music lovers around the world.

Savall’s exploration of non-Western repertoires continues with this collaboration between the members of HESPÈRION XXI and musicians from Syria, Israel, Turkey, Morocco, Greece and Armenia. Homage to Syria ‘was conceived as an act of solidarity to help raise awareness of this dramatic conflict and the terrible war of repression suffered by the Syrian people’.

“The protagonists of this project are musical expressions apparently distant in time and space, music often forgotten beneath successive layers of modernism or undervalued because of its uncertain origins: dances, prayers, songs and laments of rare beauty and intense emotion which, thanks to their buoyancy, also free us from what can be the millstone of our roots and our avoidable isolation. These melodies and rhythms spring from the improvisations on the Oriental ney and our medieval flutes, from the fascinating chants of a mysterious and evocative Islam, from the gentle bowstrokes on the rebab and the steady sound of the Italian lira, from the beats and rhythms of the ouds from Morocco, Istanbul and Israel, from the sparkling notes picked out the Iranian santur and the Turkish kanun... all carried along and encompassed by the ever-present, vibrant, magical pulse of our indispensable ancestral percussions.” Jordi Savall

“…outstandingly beautiful” Gramophone Tickets: €36, €32, €27.50

©Toni Peñarroya

JORDI SAVALL AND HESPÈRION XXI AND INVITED MUSICIANS FROM SYRIA, ISRAEL, TURKEY, MOROCCO, GREECE AND ARMENIA HOMAGE TO SYRIA ORIENT-OCCIDENT

01 417 0000 nch.ie