Angel City Jazz Festival set for October
Here's a rarity: a multi-day, multi-venue jazz festival in Los Angeles featuring some of the biggest names in new music and non-commercial jazz -- John Abercrombie , Vijay Iyer, Ravi Coltrane and Nels Cline among them.
The Angel City Jazz Festival will run Oct. 2 to Oct. 9 with a five-act show on Oct. 3 at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater. Featured at the daylong outdoor event will be the Ravi Coltrane/Ralph Alessi Quintet, Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet with Iyer on piano, Sons of Champignon (guitarist Cline, saxophonist Tim Berne and Jim Black), Vinny Golia Sextet and Kneebody.
The festival starts with bassist Henry Grimes & Friends with the Dwight Trible/John Beasley Duo at the downtown REDCAT Theater. Grimes, a premier bassist in the '50s and '60s who re-emerged in 2003, will lead a band featuring trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, woodwind player Golia, pianist Ben Rosenbloom and drummer-percussionist Alex Cline.
A benefit for festival promoter Angel City Arts will feature Myra Melford's Trio with Stomu Takeishi and Alex Cline, Japanese butoh dancer Oguri and bassist Mark Dresser at Royal/T in Culver City. Chef Paul Canales of Oliveto Restaurant will serve a four-course meal with wine.
"Dirty Baby," a project involving Nels Cline, artist Ed Ruscha and poet David Breskin, will have its world premiere at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Bing Theater on Oct. 7. The project, based on their book of the same name, is a synaesthetic mating of Ruscha's "censor strip" paintings, music and poetry. Cline will lead two of his ensembles while Breskin reads his ghazals and Ruscha's work is projected.
The world premiere of Steven Elkins' film "The Reach of Resonance" will be followed by a solo piano set by Motoko Honda at the Barnsdall Gallery Theater in Hollywood on Oct. 8.
The John Abercrombie Quartet will close out the festival Saturday with two sets at the Musicians Institute Theater in Hollywood. Guitarist Abercrombie, who has recorded for ECM since the early 1970s, leads a band of violinist Mark Feldman, bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Joey Baron.
The festival is produced by Angel City Arts in association with the L.A. County Arts Commission, LACMA, CalArts, L.A. Filmforum, Cryptogramophone Records and the Jazz Bakery.
