The Afield / Nelson Patton with Lonnie Holley

Rebecca Fischer, violinist in the Chiara Quartet, tours regularly in North America, Europe and Asia. With the Chiara Quartet, Ms. Fischer has won top prizes in the Fischoff National Chamber Music competition, the Paolo Borciani Competition in Italy, the Astral Artistic Services audition, and was awarded the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming.  Praised for her “beautiful tone and nuanced phrasing (Boston Musical Intelligencer),” she has recorded for Azica Records and New Amsterdam Records.  Ms. Fischer holds degrees from Columbia University and The Juilliard School, and her mentors include violinists Kathleen Winkler, Joel Smirnoff, Masao Kawasaki, and members of the Juilliard, Cleveland, Concord and Takacs Quartets.

Anthony Hawley is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. His art has won him residencies and awards from the MacDowell Colony, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, VCCA, and Arte Studio Ginistrelle, among others. He has exhibited and performed solo projects in venues nationally and internationally including Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City, MO; The Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, Nebraska; and Arte Studio Ginistrelle, Assisi, Italy. His most recent solo exhibition “Fault Diagnosis”—a five-day multimedia event centering around a 1985 Nissan Pulsar NX—was produced by CounterCurrent in partnership with the Menil Collection and Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Texas. He is the author of two collections of poetry, and his essays and poems have appeared in numerous publications including The Brooklyn Rail, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, Verse, and Colorado Review.  Born in 1977, Anthony Hawley grew up in Massachusetts and was educated at Columbia University and the MFA Art Practice Program at the School of Visual Arts.

Nelson Patton is an experimental duo of effected/looped trombones (Dave Nelson) and drums & Moog bass pedals (Marlon Patton). The result is a sound greater than the sum of its parts as the two musicians continue to layer and develop motifs into elaborate textures and interlocking grooves. Nelson Patton’s full-length debut was recorded in Dave’s personal studio in upstate New York over three days and features Lonnie Holley on vocals. The eleven songs on the album, edited from dozens of improvised pieces, reflect the spirit of their expansive live shows.

“We stayed true to the improvisatory spirit of the project while making this record, and I’m really glad we did,” says Dave Nelson, trombonist of Nelson Patton, about the duo’s new album, “Along The Way”. “We were able to spend a few days jamming at my studio, freely exploring new sounds and textures, and capturing it all in real time. That type of spontaneous and unfiltered improvisation is our favorite part of what we do live, so we thought ‘why not record a bunch of stuff like that for this record?’ It’s the kind of thing we’ve been wanting to do for a long time.”

That spirit of unrehearsed creativity was continued when the opportunity arose to collaborate with Lonnie Holley. Widely celebrated for his visual art, Lonnie just recently began releasing music even though he’s been singing and recording himself for many years. His music and lyrics are improvised on the spot and evolve with every new performance, an approach that works perfectly with Nelson Patton’s music. “Lonnie came into the studio and would listen to like 30 seconds of a track and say, ‘I’ve got it!’ and then run into the booth and all these beautiful ideas would just start pouring out of him in real time,” says Marlon. “It was amazing to watch him work.”

Both successful sidemen and session players, Dave Nelson (The National, David Byrne/St.Vincent, Sufjan Stevens) and Marlon Patton (Jim White, Larkin Poe, Lera Lynn) joined forces in 2013 to form Nelson Patton as a creative outlet. Dave’s use of the loop pedal as a minimalistic compositional tool recalls influences of Brian Eno and Steve Reich, and Marlon’s intricate drumming and Moog bass add dynamic punctuation, channelling John Bonham and Max Roach.