Culture

Kurt Rosenwinkel’s “Post-jazz Sonic Trio” to perform at the Vermont Jazz Center on Saturday, September 17th at 8:00 PM

On September 17th at 8:00 PM, the Vermont Jazz Center will kick off its 2016-17 season with a guitar enthusiast’s dream: Kurt Rosenwinkel and his “post-jazz sonic trio of breathtaking virtuosity.” His new group, Bandit 65, is fresh off of two European tours and performances in Los Angeles, Montreal, Philly and Boston. Bandit 65 explores the potential of combining drums with two guitarists replete with looping pedals and electronic enhancement to create a brand-new sonic landscape. Guitarist Pat Metheny has stated “I admire the musician who makes the commitment to ask the harder musical questions that transcend the everyday issues of style and idiom, such is Kurt Rosenwinkel – a thinking guitarist who is working hard to come up with answers that meet his own personal criteria of what music is and what music can be.” Never one to sit on his laurels, Bandit 65 represents Rosenwinkel’s next phase of development, a distinct move from the Standards Trio he has been touring with the past few years.

Bandit 65 is Kurt Rosenwinkel on guitar and electronics, Tim Motzer on guitar, prepared guitar, loops and electronics and Gintas Janusonis on drums, percussion and “circuit bent toys.” The music they play is outer-worldly, filled with varied sounds, textures and grooves; it is exceptionally dynamic, exploring the range that exists from the “spaces in between the notes” to “sheets of sound.” The music we will be hearing on September 17th is not bebop, swing or the sophisticated, composed melodies that many of us are accustomed to hearing from Rosenwinkel. It is a new, progressive exploration of the counterpoint of never before heard sounds. Like Miles Davis, Rosenwinkel is too impatient to stand in one place for too long – his brilliant, curious mind will not be constrained to recreating his past successes. Like Metheny states, this new group is Rosenwinkel’s response to “transcending the everyday issues of style and idiom.”

Learn to play the ukulele in this new round of Ukulele-for-Beginners classes, starting mid-September, taught by Lisa McCormick. Location: New England Youth Theater, 100 Flat St., Brattleboro, with off-street parking and wheelchair accessibility. Daytime and evening options are available. Classes run for 6 weeks. For more info, visit bit.ly/UkeClass

Guilford, Vt. – As it has done for a half-century, Friends of Music at Guilford opens its annual music season with a concert in a rural barn on Saturday night of Labor Day Weekend. The Organ Barn is at Tree Frog Farm in an idyllic setting near the state line where Guilford meets Leyden, Massachusetts. The intimate Organ Barn seats about a hundred concertgoers, and on Sunday afternoon, two hundred or more people flock to the site for picnicking and an orchestra concert outside the Barn.

At 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, September 3, what is usually billed simply as “an organ concert in the barn” will be performed on both the resident c. 1897 tracker organ and a “visiting” harpsichord with transverse flute and vocal soloist. Featured performers are the duo Les Inégales—Christine Gevert, organ and harpsichord, and Rodrigo Tarraza, traverso—with colleague Nicholas Tamagna, countertenor. Their “Music in the Age of Enlightenment” program includes works by J. S. Bach, Telemann, Corelli, Handel, and their somewhat less-famous contemporaries Joseph Bodin de Boismortier, Jean-Henri d’Anglebert, and Johann Christoph Pepusch. The repertoire includes pieces for solo organ or harpsichord, as well as a variety of duets and trios.