music | Friday, January 5 | 7–9 PM | FREE
Chacon/Nakatani/Santistevan Trio with Kenneth Cornell & Steve Jansen
Friday, January 5th, 7–9 PM as Part of the ABQ Artwalk
This Friday, January 5th, from 7–9 PM, come enjoy FREE music from the Chacon | Nakatani | Santistevan Trio, and Kenneth Cornell & Steve Jansen. Also featuring the artwork of Jessie Littlebird.
Raven Chacon is joining the FUSION stage with Tatsuya Nakatani and Carlos Santistevan. Comprising three of New Mexico’s finest and most diverse improvising musicians and composers, this trio creates, as they describe it, “improvisational music of urgency and deep resonance.”
Chacon is a composer, performer, and visual artist, creating videos, prints, photographs and installations that bring sonic experimentation into the gallery. Chacon is the “first Native American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Music, for his VOICELESS MASS in 2022.” Score-based creation is fundamental to his practice, encouraging generous forms of collaboration among performers and audiences, sights of significance, nonhuman actors, found sounds, and natural elements. In this way, he connects Diné (Navajo) worldviews and relationship models with Western classical, avant-garde, and art-music traditions.
The Chacon | Nakatani | Santistevan Trio was formed during the pandemic when Baltimore’s High Zero Festival asked curators around the country to assemble improvisers in their regions for a streaming edition of the festival. Santa Fe bassist Carlos Santistevan invited percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, and guitarist/composer Raven Chacon to play with him, and they recorded their first official session together in Santa Fe’s San Miguel Chapel—the oldest chapel in the United States. The trio’s unique sound is created by their unique experiences in a myriad of other musical fields. As they describe it, “Nakatani’s frenetic percussion provides a foundation for the buzzsaw swarm of stringed instruments from Chacon and Santistevan. Throughout the two improvisations, beats and crashes map the space, the adobe walls offering a muted and earthen resonance.”
Kenneth Cornell and Steve Jansen will also be performing!
ABOUT TATSUYA NAKATANI
Tatsuya Nakatani is an avant-garde percussionist, composer, and artist of sound. Active internationally since the 1990s, Nakatani has released over 80 recordings and tours extensively, performing over 150 concerts a year. His primary focus is his solo work and his large ensemble project, the Nakatani Gong Orchestra. He teaches master classes and lectures at universities and music conservatories around the world. Originally from Japan, he makes his home in the desert town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. With his activity in new music, improvisation, and experimental music, Nakatani has a long history of collaboration.
Nakatani's distinctive music centered around his adapted bowed gong, supported by an array of drums, cymbals, and singing bowls. In consort with his personally hand-carved Kobo Bows, he has spent decades refining and developing his sound as an arrangement of formations of vibrations, incorporated in shimmering layers of silence and texture. Within this contemporary work, one can still recognize the dramatic pacing, formal elegance and space (ma) felt in traditional Japanese music.
ABOUT CARLOS SANTISTEVAN
Carlos Santistevan is a musician, sounds engineer, and organizer. Since 2001 he has helped establish an oasis of creative music in the high desert southwest as the director of the High Mayhem Emerging Arts collective based out of Santa Fe, NM. Using an upright bass and electronics he creates soundscapes and spontaneous compositions from the extremes of acoustic and electric music. Early influences of punk rock and free jazz have led him to develop a unique approach to music and improvisation. He has performed at High Zero Festival, Ende Tymes Festival, The Outpost Performance Space, Hemlock Tavern, SITE Santa Fe, the Empty Bottle, Outsound Creative Music Festival, The Olympia Experimental Music Festival, High Mayhem Festival and more performing with such artists as: J.A. Dino Deane, Laura Ortman, Thollem McDonas, Tania Caroline Chen, Marshall Trammell, Chris Jonas, Tatsuya Nakatani and more. Carlos is a seasoned improviser and a member of diverse ensembles such as In Defense of Memory, iNK oN pAPER, The Uninvited Guest(s), The Late Severa Wires, Out of Context, Black Iron Trio, Taiji Pole and more.