Brandon Lopez Trio
Brandon Lopez (b. 1988) is a New York-based composer and bassist working at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise, and new music.
All ages event. Tickets are $20.00 regular admission / $10.00 students and struggling music supporters. (Free for Wash U students with ID)
Brandon Lopez – upright bass / compositions
Mat Maneri – violin / viola
Randy Peterson – drums
Biography:
Brandon Lopez (B. 1988) is a New York-based composer and bassist working at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise and new music. His music has been praised as “brutal” (Chicago Reader) and “relentless” (The New York Times). New Music Circle and the Department of Music, Washington University, are extremely excited to debut Brandon Lopez in St. Louis, who will be leading a quartet comprised of some of NYC's best jazz-improvisers; drummer, Gerald Cleaver, saxophonist, Brandon Nelson, and saxophonist, James Brandon Lewis.
From the New York Philharmonic's David Geffen Hall to the DIY basements of Brooklyn, Lopez has worked beside many luminaries of jazz, classical, poetry, and experimental music, including Fred Moten, John Zorn, Okkyung Lee, Ingrid Laubrock, Tony Malaby, Tyshawn Sorey, Cecilia Lopez, Sun Ra Arkestra, Susan Alcorn, Mette Rasmussen, and many others. Recent highlight performances include opening the 2018–2019 season of the New York Philharmonic as a featured soloist in Ashley Fure’s “Filament” and a number of works with John Zorn, including the Zorn’s 35th anniversary of “Cobra.”
Mat Maneri, a leading improvisational voice of his generation, was born in Brooklyn in 1969. He began studying the violin at the age of five, but since borrowing a viola for a jam session at the 1998 ECM festival in Badenweiler, he has made the viola his instrument of choice. Important influences on Maneri’s work – in addition to all the major forces of jazz – include Baroque music (which he studied with Juilliard String Quartet co-founder Robert Koff), Elliott Carter, and the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, which was also of central importance to his father, the late, great saxophonist, clarinettist, composer and educator Joe Maneri. Of his studies with Koff, Mat Maneri has said: “Studying Baroque music helped me to find my sound. [Koff] brought me into the world of contrapuntal playing and a way of using the bow that sounded more like a trumpet, like Miles, to my mind.”
Far from the spectacle of music, drummer Randy Peterson has been quietly cultivating a singular approach to pulse and time that is both deeply profound and mysteriously idiosyncratic. Peterson spent numerous years working with pioneering microtonal free jazz saxophonist Joe Maneri, often in a quartet with son Mat Maneri (violin/viola) and double bassists Ed Schuller and John Lockwood. Decades of work with the Maneris provided a context for Peterson to develop his esoteric approach to drumming – a microtonal translation from the melodic to the rhythmic he calls the Rhythmic Continuum.
Peterson has appeared on several albums with both Joe and Mat Maneri on the Leo, Hat Hut and ECM labels. Other collaborators include saxophonist Tony Malaby, double bassist Nate McBride, pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, and double bass maestro Michael Formanek.
Photography by Cameron Kelly