Ken Field | |
---|---|
Background information | |
Born | January 26, 1953 |
Genres | Jazz |
Instrument(s) | Saxophone, flute, percussion |
Website | http://kenfield.org |
Ken Field (born January 26, 1953) is a saxophonist, flautist, percussionist, and composer. [1] Since 1988 he has been a member of the electrified modern music ensemble Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, with whom he has recorded eight CDs. [2]
Field has been Composer-in-Residence at the Ucross Foundation, Wyoming, the Fundación Valparaíso, Spain, the MacDowell Colony, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida. He has performed for President Bill Clinton, and with former J. Geils frontman Peter Wolf. Ken Field is a Vandoren Performing Artist.
Field has also composed music for animation, film, and dance, including music for children's television program Sesame Street. [3]
Field was named a Finalist in Music Composition by the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2017.
Field leads the Revolutionary Snake Ensemble, [4] a New Orleans-inspired improvisational brass band. [5] Their 2008 release Forked Tongue appeared on best-of-year lists in the Village Voice and the Estonian Postimees , as well as on lists in Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas, Wisconsin, and New York. Year of the Snake, the group's 2003 debut release, was included on best-of-year lists from WNYC Radio, the Gambit Weekly , and the Italian station Radio Popolare. The group has performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Puffin Cultural Forum, Berklee Performance Center, and numerous other venues, and has been nominated for a Boston Music Award, and several Boston Phoenix/WFNX Best Music Poll awards.
Field married the filmmaker Karen Aqua in 1984.
Field has undertaken residencies and conducted workshops at a number of US universities. He was formerly on the faculty of the Music Maker School, where he taught saxophone and flute. He also hosts The New Edge, a weekly radio program on WMBR in Cambridge, Massachusetts and WOMR in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and curated and co-directed Cultural Constructions, an intercultural music performance project. Field is Vice-President of the Board of Directors of Cambridge, MA based Tutoring Plus of Cambridge, President of the Board of Directors of JazzBoston, and a member of the Organizing Committee of the HONK! Festival of Activist Street Bands.
Field is Master of the Studio of Music Business, Composition, Performance, and Soundtrack Design with The Beijing DeTao Masters Academy (DTMA), a high-level, multi-disciplined, application-oriented higher education institution in Shanghai, China.
Stephen Michael Reich is an American composer who is known for his contribution to the development of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. Reich's work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons. Reich describes this concept in his essay, "Music as a Gradual Process", by stating, "I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music." For example, his early works experiment with phase shifting, in which one or more repeated phrases plays slower or faster than the others, causing it to go "out of phase." This creates new musical patterns in a perceptible flow.
Evan Ziporyn is an American composer of post-minimalist music with a cross-cultural orientation, drawing equally from classical music, avant-garde, various world music traditions, and jazz. Ziporyn has composed for a wide range of ensembles, including symphony orchestras, wind ensembles, many types of chamber groups, and solo works, sometimes involving electronics. Balinese gamelan, for which he has composed numerous works, has compositions. He is known for his solo performances on clarinet and bass clarinet; additionally, Ziporyn plays gender wayang and other Balinese instruments, saxophones, piano & keyboards, EWI, and Shona mbira.
Ken Vandermark is an American composer, saxophonist, and clarinetist.
Birdsongs of the Mesozoic is an American musical group founded in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, in 1980.
Susie Ibarra is a contemporary composer and percussionist who has worked and recorded with jazz, classical, world, and indigenous musicians. One of SPIN's "100 Greatest Drummers of Alternative Music," she is known for her work as a performer in avant-garde, jazz, world, and new music. As a composer, Ibarra incorporates diverse styles and the influences of Philippine Kulintang, jazz, classical, poetry, musical theater, opera, and electronic music. Ibarra remains active as a composer, performer, educator, and documentary filmmaker in the U.S., Philippines, and internationally. She is interested and involved in works that blend folkloric and indigenous tradition with avant-garde. In 2004, Ibarra began field recording indigenous Philippine music, and in 2009 she co-founded Song of the Bird King, an organization focusing on the preservation of Indigenous music and ecology.
Catherine B. Brazelton is a New York-based American composer, bandleader, improviser, singer/songwriter, and instrumentalist. She has released albums and fronted bands across varied genres, including contemporary classical, electronic music, pop, art rock, punk, and avant-garde jazz. She was awarded the 2012 Carl von Ossietsky Composition Prize for Storm, a choral setting of Psalm 104 featuring Brazelton's own retranslation. Her opera Art of Memory was awarded the 2015 Grant for Female Composers from Opera America.
Meriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was an American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music.
Martin Gordon is an English musician who plays bass guitar, double bass, and piano. After a long period as band member and session musician, he embarked on a solo career in 2004. His most recent album release was in 2023.
Vijay Iyer is an American composer, pianist, bandleader, producer and writer based in New York City. The New York Times has called him a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway". Iyer received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. He was voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat magazine international critics' polls in 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2018. In 2014, he received a lifetime appointment as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University, where he was jointly appointed in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies.
Innova Recordings is the independent record label of the non-profit American Composers Forum based in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was founded in 1982 to document the winners of the McKnight Fellowship offered by its parent organization, the Minnesota Composers Forum.
Newman Taylor Baker is a jazz drummer and a washboard player.
Todd Reynolds is an American violinist, composer, and conductor well known for his work with amplified violin and electronics.
The Revolutionary Snake Ensemble is an American instrumental musical group led by Boston, Massachusetts based saxophonist Ken Field. They performs an improvised style inspired by the second line brass bands of New Orleans parades. The group's colorful costumes and creative arrangements have earned it invitations to entertain audiences as large as 20,000
Scott Billington is an American record producer, songwriter, record company executive and blues musician.
Erdem Helvacioglu is an electronic musician from Turkey. He has collaborated with artists Mick Karn, Kevin Moore, John Wilson, Kazuya Ishigami, and Saadet Turkoz. He also composes music for theatre, film and multimedia productions, and produces for popular and rock music bands in Turkey. He has received numerous international awards including prizes from the Luigi Russolo and Insulae Electronicae Electroacoustic Music Competitions.
Ken Filiano is an American jazz and orchestral bassist based in Brooklyn, New York.
Lisa Carol Bielawa is a composer and vocalist. She is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition and spent a year composing as a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Israel Tanenbaum-Rivera is an American pianist, music producer, composer, arranger and audio engineer who has produced more than 50 albums and participated in over 100 recordings.
Cristian Amigo is an American composer, improviser, guitarist, sound designer, and ethnomusicologist. His compositional and performing output includes blues and soul, music for the theater, chamber and orchestral music, opera, avant-jazz and rock music, and art/pop song. He has also recorded solo albums on the innova, Deep Ecology and BA labels. Amigo earned a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from UCLA where he focused on the music of Chile, Peru, and Argentina, as well as anthropological theory, critical studies, and intercultural aesthetics. While in graduate school, he was second guitarist to the Peruvian Afro-Criollo guitarist Carlos Hayre, with whom he played in concerts and festivals including the World Festival of Sacred Music. He is currently composer-in-residence at INTAR Theater in New York City and Music/Design/Production Faculty @ CalArts School of Theater Department of Experience Design and Production in Valencia, California.
Theodore Burnett III, who performs under the name Ras Burnett, is a composer, multi-instrumentalist specializing in saxophone and flute, musicologist and educator.