From the Charlotte Observer's pages - an article by Courtney Devores last Friday:
>>Experimental avant-garde jazz isn't necessarily popular with mainstream audiences, but local musician Brent Bagwell (Great Architect, the Eastern Seaboard) says there's a market for it in Charlotte.
"There are probably 500 people in Charlotte that would like this (music) if I could reach them consistently," says Bagwell, who has booked fringe jazz and improv artists at The Milestone, Lunchbox Records and Century Vintage since moving to Charlotte from Brooklyn in 2004.
His latest venture is a monthly Modern Music series at NoDa's Dialect Design, which kicked off in October with Chicago Luzern Exchange, a collaboration between American and Swiss musicians. Trumpet and bassoon soloists Jacob Wick and Katherine Young will perform Wednesday. Japanese percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani ends the three-month series on Dec. 19. Great Architect will also perform at each event, and Bagwell hopes to book more shows there in 2011.
"I'm a hopeless optimist," says Bagwell, an S.C. native who studied English at the University of Georgia before turning to an intense, self-guided private musical instruction program and playing in bands while living in New York.
"It's unfamiliar music. It reflects things that are happening right now. Anyone I could coerce into coming to see a show, they're going to be into it when they leave. I was not so sure about things a few years ago. Now I feel like there is this influx of people in their early twenties... they know everything from the Internet," he says of young audiences that are as familiar with John Coltrane's later catalog as they are with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore.
"There is also the McColl fellowship art sorts who love it, too."
The NoDa art space's cork floors, exposed brick and intimate setting make it a great place to hear soloists like Nakatani, whose work he describes as "riveting." Of Wick he says, "I think he likes to do this solo thing as a test of his own mettle. I set him up with a house show. He wanted to play something super-intimate with 20 people. By the end of his set, everyone was paying attention - and that's some serious authority for someone in his early twenties to yield." <<
you can pick up the whole article at the observer
No comments:
Post a Comment