Opening Night

Sophia Brous is an interdisciplinary performer, vocalist, composer, curator, and festival director. She undertook scholarship study in jazz and improvisation at the New England Conservatory, Boston and Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. A performer with diverse interests, she works and collaborates with a vast range of companies and festivals internationally. She is a 2016 artist-in-resident at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, Artistic Associate of the Arts Centre Melbourne, and will be 2016/17 artist-in-resident at National Sawdust, New York. Recent and ongoing projects include the Barbican’s world premiere touring production In Dreams: David Lynch Revisited, her theatricalised song cycle Lullaby Movement, with David Coulter and Leo Abrahams, originally commissioned by Urbantheatre Projects for the Sydney Festival 2015; Marina Abramovic’s Private Archaeology and the 40-voice choral work Last Summer with Julia Holter for the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart; The Southbank Centre’s production 200 Motels by Franz Zappa with the BBC Concert Orchestra; Mick Harvey’s ‘Intoxicated Man’ cult Gainsbourg project (Mute), New York contemporary art ensemble collective ‘EXO-TECH’ with Kimbra and members of Cibo Matto, TV On The Radio and Antony& The Johnsons; and her celebrated solo filmic solo pop moniker Brous. Brous is a recognised curator and artistic director and emerged as one of Australia’s youngest arts leaders when she was made the Program Director of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival at 22. She went on to be the curator of music of the Adelaide Festival of the Arts and is currently founding curator of Supersense: Festival of the Ecstatic at the Arts Centre Melbourne.

Leo Abrahams is an English musician, composer, and producer. He has collaborated with a multitude of professional musicians, including Brian Eno, Imogen Heap, David Byrne, Jarvis Cocker, Regina Spector, and Paul Simon. After attending the Royal Academy of Music in England, he started his musical career by touring as lead guitarist with Imogen Heap. Starting in 2005 he has released five solo albums, largely in an ambient style involving complex arrangements and a use of guitar-generated textures. He has also co-written or arranged a variety of film soundtracks, including Peter Jackson’s 2009 release The Lovely Bones and Steve McQueen’s Hunger.

Todd Reynolds is known as one of the founding fathers of the hybrid-musician movement and one of the most active and versatile proponents of what he calls ‘present music’. For years the violinist of choice for Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, Bang on a Can, and a founder of the string quartet known as Ethel, his compositional and performance style is a hybrid of old and new technology, multi-disciplinary aesthetic and pan-genre composition and improvisation. His double-disc debut album Outerborough was released in 2011 on the Innova label.

Mauro Refosco is a Brazilian percussionist and founding member of the band Forro in the Dark. He has also worked with David Byrne, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Atoms for Peace, and, most recently, David Byrne and St Vincent on their album Love This Giant. He has studied at São Paulo State University in São Paulo, Brazil and at the Manhattan School of Music in New York.

Helga Davis is a New York based artist whose interdisciplinary work includes collaborations with composers and choreographers alike. She is the recipient of the BRIC Media Arts Fireworks grant and completed performances of her first evening-length theater piece, Cassandra. She was hailed for her performance in the restaging of Einstein on the Beach by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass. In 2012 she appeared in VOX the Contemporary American Opera Lab run by the City Opera of New York in Paola Prestini’s Oceanic Verses which premiered at the Kennedy and with cellist Maya Beiser in Elsewhere, with music by Missy Mazolli. In 2011 Davis served as a “Sweet Peach” in Soho Rep’s production of Jomama Jones, Radiate, a production which made New Yorker theatre critic Hilton Als’ top ten list in 2011. In 2008 Davis conducted a special feature interview with artist Kara Walker for the WNYC program Morning Edition on the eve of her Whitney Museum retrospective. Davis also wrote and performed a new multi-media piece entitled Imaginings at the retrospective’s conclusion. Also in 2008 Davis starred in The Blue Planet, a multi-media theater piece written by Peter Greenaway and directed by Saskia Boddeke. In 2007 Davis began hosting Overnight Music on WNYC and was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor Multimedia Award for hosting 24:33: twenty-four hours and thirty-three minutes of the playful and playable John Cage. From 2003 – 2005 she was the co-star of The Temptation of St. Anthony, directed by Robert Wilson with libretto and score by Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock.  2001, Wire Magazine’s David Keenan described Helga as “a powerful vocalist with an almost operatic range and all the bruised sensuality of Jeanne Lee.” She continues to serve as host/commentator of WNYC’s Battle of the Boroughs.

Courtney Bryan, a native of New Orleans, La, is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (New York Times). Her music is in conversation with various musical genres, including jazz and other types of experimental music, as well as traditional gospel, spirituals, and hymns. Bryan has academic degrees from Oberlin Conservatory (BM), Rutgers University (MM), and Columbia University (DMA) with advisor George Lewis. Following an appointment as Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, she will begin her position as Assistant Professor of Music at Tulane University’s Newcomb Department of Music beginning in Fall 2016.

Bryan’s work has been presented in a wide range of venues, including Lincoln Center, Miller Theatre, Symphony Space, The Stone, Roulette Intermedium, La MaMa Experimental Theatre, National Gallery of Art, Blue Note Jazz Club, Jazz Gallery, and Bethany and Abyssinian Baptist Churches. Upcoming commissions include pieces for the Colorado Springs Philharmonic, Miller Theatre, Carnegie Hall’s Link Up program, and Duo Noire. Bryan has two independent recordings, “Quest for Freedom” (2007) and “This Little Light of Mine” (2010

Davóne Tines, deemed a “…singer of immense power and fervor…” by The Los Angeles Times and a “…charismatic, full-voiced bass-baritone…” by The New York Times, is building an international career commanding a broad spectrum of opera and concert performance.  The 2015-16 season offered breakout performances on both sides of The Atlantic: the Dutch National Opera presented his company debut starring opposite French counter tenor Philippe Jaroussky in the premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains directed by Peter Sellars and The Los Angeles Times exalted Davóne Tines as “the find of the season,” for performances of Caroline Shaw’s By & By with the Calder Quartet and Kaija Saariaho’s Sombre with members of ICE at the Ojai Music Festival.   

Performances of the present season include John Adams’ El Niño under the composer’s baton with the London Symphony Orchestra in London and on tour in France as well as with Grant Gershon conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bruckner’s Te Deum with Christopher Warren-Green and the Charlotte Symphony, and the Paris premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s True Fire with the Orchestre national de France.  On the opera stage, Davóne Tines makes his debuts at Lisbon’s Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in a new production of Oedipus Rex led by Music Director Joana Carneiro and at the Finnish National Opera reprising the roles he created at the Dutch National Opera in Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains directed by Peter Sellars.

Highlights of the recent past include the world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s opera, Crossing, directed by multi Tony Award-winning director Diane Paulus, for which The Wall Street Journal called him a “glowing bass-baritone” and the Stylus Music Journal said he “…brought the house down with his eloquent and painful singing” in the leading role of Freddie Stowers.   Davóne Tines also premiered the one-man chamber opera, American Gothic, for which Details applauded his “…lush voice” and stated that “each section of the work benefits from Tines’ heartbreakingly rendered supplications…” 

Mr. Tines performed with the Boston Pops in Symphony Hall and at Tanglewood where he was a Tanglewood Music Center Fellow.  He has given performances of La bohème at the Royal Opera House Oman, La fanciulla del West with the Castelton Festival and on tour in Spain, as well as Otello all under the baton of Lorin Maazel.

Jazz pianist, keyboardist, producer and composer Marc Cary holds tight to his roots in Washington, D.C.’s go-go music scene, but they represent only one element among the myriad. Cary’s interests run from Indian classical to Malian music to hip-hop. He started his career working with Betty Carter, a legendary vocalist famous for drawing soul and sincerity out of her bands, and went on to work with Roy Hargrove, Dizzy Gillespie, Erykah Badu, Shirley Horn, Stefon Harris, Q-Tip and – most influential of all – Abbey Lincoln.

Cary’s For the Love of Abbey (2013) is his first solo piano record, and possibly his most intimate. Covering 10 of Lincoln’s songs, and offering three original tunes in tribute to her, Cary conjures a shimmering, timeless aura that bespeaks the spiritual and artistic lessons that the late singer conferred upon him.

“I went to Abbey’s house and watched her play the piano and sing these songs,” Cary remembers. “She could play any song but she was a very minimal player. Maybe the melody note and a couple other notes. That was how she would hear it, and I always had to think about it like that when I played.” On the solo disc, the challenge was to apply her focus on peaceful, unadorned melody within a lush habitat of pianistic harmony.

Critics agree that Cary has achieved a remarkable balance. JazzTimes calls the album “a moving love letter to one of his mentors,” and says “For the Love of Abbey shimmers and soars.” CriticalJazz.com gave the record five stars, arguing that it “successfully transform[s] the work of his friend and mentor into a personal statement with deep spiritual and emotional content.”

Marc Cary was born in New York City in 1967, but moved to D.C. as a young child. Growing up in a neglected city during the 1970s and ’80s, it was easy to run into trouble – but music remained a steadying force. At 14 he joined the High Integrity Band, a group that practiced the native D.C. art form of go-go, a dance music blending funk, hip-hop, Afro-Caribbean drumming and traditional call-and-response elements. With the help of a city-run public arts program, Let ’Em Play, he learned jazz piano from some of D.C.’s most esteemed musicians and performed professionally during summers.

For high school Cary attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, and played in the Dizzy Gillespie Youth Orchestra, based at the storied D.C. jazz club Blues Alley. When Cary took a standout solo during a performance of “A Night in Tunisia,” it caught the ear of Gillespie himself, and from then on the trumpet legend let Cary sit in whenever his band came through D.C.

A fledgling Cary soon came under the wing of that group’s pianist, Walter Davis, Jr., who encouraged him to move to New York City. And after two years of studying at the University of the District of Columbia under the tutelage of renowned trombonist and educator Calvin Jones, Cary did relocate in 1988. Within months of arriving in the jazz capital, he was playing in bands led by Arthur Taylor, Mickey Bass and Betty Carter, all major figures from jazz’s mid-century heyday.

At the same time, he quickly befriended and started working with Q-Tip, the famed emcee from A Tribe Called Quest; members of the Wu Tang Clan; and other prominent hip-hop musicians. (Cary produced and played keyboards on much of The Renaissance, Q-Tip’s Grammy-nominated solo album.) His longtime interest in dance music – stemming from his love for go-go and the music of the African Diaspora – eventually led Cary to reach past even hip-hop; he started collaborating with world-renowned house musicians like Louie Vega and Joe Claussell, both of whom traded remixes with Cary of each other’s songs.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, Cary stayed on the road with Carter for two and a half years, becoming one of the vocalist’s longest-serving pianists. In 1991, he left to join trumpet phenom Roy Hargrove’s band. Cary remembers that that group’s music was viewed as representing “a monumental leap for the young bands in jazz. We made an impact right after Wynton Marsalis and Terence Blanchard. It was coming from a more urban perspective, but still swinging.”

He went on to perform with the Abraham Burton Quartet, then rejoined Betty Carter, and finally ended up alongside Abbey Lincoln. “Going from Betty to Abbey was like going from the street to the theater,” Cary says. With Lincoln, “you had to have that same skill as you needed with Betty, but it was supposed to allow you to not have to do any of the kinds of things Betty always demanded.” From Lincoln he learned the power of simplicity, focus and soul-baring musical poetry.

In 1995, Cary released his debut, Cary On, a striking record that introduced his songwriting talents with grooving originals like “The Vibe” and “So Gracefully.” The album featured an all-star cast including Hargrove and saxophonist Ron Blake. He followed it with 1997’s Listen, then The Antidote in 1998 – both strong displays of Cary’s developing skills as a broad-minded pianist and bandleader. Trillium, released in 1999, found Cary working with longtime collaborators Nasheet Waits on drums and Tarus Mateen on bass (the rhythm section tht would soon become the foundation of Jason Moran’s award-winning Bandwagon trio). On Trillium, the only official document of the Cary-Mateen-Waits trio, they pummel past the blues, playing with joy, conviction and heavy-stepping strength over originals and covers of tunes by Miles Davis and Duke Pearson.

All the while, Cary had been working on a pair of electronic music projects. In 1998, he released a limited-edition LP, titled Indigenous Music, on Claussell’s Ibadan label. The record finds Cary pairing his production skills with live percussion and horns, all in servoce of electric refractions of West African and Caribbean grooves. He followed that album with a project called Rhodes Ahead: Vol. 1, on which he welds his interest in ambient music with his dance roots, doing it all through the lens of the Fender Rhodes electric piano. It was a revolutionary record, and it contributed directly to Cary winning BET’s first-ever Best New Jazz Artist award the following year.

Also in 1999, Cary released his first record with Indigenous People, a new project building on the Indigenous Music album and uniting his love for go-go, hip-hop, Native American, jazz, house and West African music. On Captured: Live in Brazil, the band’s extended improvisations never get in the way of an infectious dance sensibility. Indigenous People toured extensively internationally and went on to release two more strong, danceable albums: Unite in 2001 and N.G.G.R. Please in 2003.

By the mid-2000s, Cary had developed a new jazz trio with an intimate rapport. He called it the Focus Trio, and it featured David Ewell on bass and Sameer Gupta on drums and tablas. With this group Cary found a new way to juxtapose his improvisational calmness and equipoise with a pulsing urgency and a sense of searching.

e of Abbey to Cosmic Indigenous. The latest incarnation of the Indigenous People ensemble, Cosmic Indigenous blends Indian classical, go-go and Malian music to form an infectious, danceable, electronically throbbing whole. As a sideman, Cary continues to tour with Stefon Harris, Cindy Blackman, Will Calhoun and other preeminent jazz musicians.

In pondering his future in the music, he reflects: “I used to ride motorcycles. There’s a point where you are at the mercy of the bike – you jump over something, you’re in the air, you don’t know what’s going to happen. But you enjoy the whole thing without anticipating. You just react to it. I will have accomplished my goal as a musician, to this point, if I can reach that.”

Dubbed “independent-minded” by The New Yorker, PUBLIQuartet’s creative programming lends a fresh perspective to the Classical music scene. Founded in 2010, PQ’s innovative programs span arrangements from the classical canon, contemporary works, original compositions, and open-form improvisations that expand the techniques and aesthetic of the traditional string quartet.

Next season, 2016-17, PQ will hold the prestigious title of Quartet-In-Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art​, performing seven concerts throughout the various galleries​, Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, and the Cloisters. PQ was selected as the Concert Artists Guild’s New Music/New Places Ensemble at the 2013 CAG Victor Elmaleh Competition, winning their 2013 Sylvia Ann Hewlett Adventurous Artist Prize. Hailed by WQXR as a “…‘genre-independent’ quartet that not only vehemently supports emerging composers, but also composes collectively – a rare occurrence in this field,” the group received Chamber Music America’s 2015 ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award for outstanding and innovative approaches to contemporary classical, jazz, and world chamber music.

PUBLIQuartet’s commitment to supporting emerging composers inspired their innovative program, PUBLIQ Access. PQA is designed to promote composers at the most formative point in their careers and presents under-represented music in the string quartet repertoire in a variety of styles; from classical, jazz, electronic, to non-notated, world, and improvised music. In its first two years, the program has received over 250 submissions from composers across the U.S. PQ recently recorded these works on their debut album, and every PUBLIQuartet concert highlights at least one PUBLIQ Access composition, bringing exposure of this music to the widest possible reach, including their sold-out Carnegie Hall debut and newly released self-titled debut album on CAG Records.

MIND|THE|GAP, described by The Strad as “ingenious hybrids”, is an original program which was developed by PUBLIQuartet in 2011 to generate an interest in new music and keep traditional classical music relevant to modern audiences. Intertwining compositions from seemingly disparate genres, their “ingenious, freewheeling hybrids” (STRAD magazine) touch on deeper connections between traditional, modern and popular music through improvisation and group composition. PQ’s MIND|THE|GAP compositions have been proclaimed as “remarkable” and “innovative music making without any condescension or compromise” (Feast of Music). The ensemble was featured in the Winter 2015 issue of Symphony Magazine as “Leaders of the New School” for their “audacious rearranging of beloved masterworks.” Along with string quartet composition, MIND|THE|GAP features a collaboration with hip-hop poetry trio, The Mighty Third Rail entitled Changing Night. This classical/hip-hop mash-up is a contemporary take on the Garden of Eden tale inspired by the music György Ligeti. The premiere of this work was presented by Symphony Space and subsequently through the PUBLIC Theater, at the LaMama Experimental Theater in New York City and the Huntington Arts Festival in Huntington, New York.

PUBLIQuartet has performed in a diverse range of venues from Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall to the Detroit Institute of Arts, Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola and Newport Jazz Festival. They have been presented by the Chautauqua Institution, Virgina Arts Festival, American Composers Orchestra, Fordham University in Lincoln Center, American Modern Ensemble, Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Queens College, and the Music of Now festival at Symphony Space. They have collaborated with members of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), JACK Quartet, Nadia Sirota, and amazing jazz legends, Billy Childs, Bob Stewart, and Don Byron. Graduates from the Mannes School of Music and Eastman School of music, their mentors include members of the Muir, Juilliard, Orion, Mendelssohn, Tokyo, American, and Brentano String Quartets and composers Laura Kaminsky, Joan Tower, and Butch Morris. They have participated in residencies at the Juilliard String Quartet Program, Robert Mann String Quartet Institute, Deer Valley Music Festival, Shouse Institute, and Banff Centre.