Blues for Smoke: Matana Roberts, Keiji Haino and Loren Connors

Lower Gallery

Join us for an evening of adventurous music featuring a new solo performance by Matana Roberts made specificially in relation to Blues for Smoke, and a duo guitar improvisation by Keiji Haino and Loren Connors. Following her performance, Roberts will discuss her work in a conversation with the audience.

Matana Roberts:
Chicago-born sound experimentalist Matana Roberts works in many performance mediums including improvisation, dance, poetry, and theater. A dynamic saxophonist, composer, and improviser, she aims to expose the mystical roots and spiritual traditions of American creative expression in her music. Her innovative work has forged new conceptual approaches to considering narrativity, history, and political expression within improvisatory structures.

This evening's performance:

+ephemera:+
shifting.
shouting.
dirged.
winged.
a solo sound and image exploration/excavation of blue(s) and blood(s), blood(s) and blue(s)....

Keiji Haino:
Active since the 1970s, the Japanese improviser and singer-songwriter Keiji Haino remains a formidable figure in contemporary experimental music with both his solo and collaborative projects, which include Lost Aaraaf, Fushitsusha, and Aihiyo. Haino's expansive and evolving body of work has included rock, free improvisation, noise music, percussion, psychedelia, minimalism, and drone music. 

Presented in collaboration with Issue Project Room as part of a three-night series with Keiji Haino, April 17, 18 and 20, 2013.

 

Loren Connors:
Composer and improviser Loren Connors's singular adaptation of the blues is a distinct personal vision combining the Delta bottleneck style and the ancestral blues voice with hauntingly unexpected guitar sounds. Since the late 1970s, Connors has issued more than fifty guitar records on his own imprints (Daggett, St. Joan, and Black Label) and over two dozen on other labels. His latest studio album, I Wish I Didn't Dream, recorded with vocalist Suzanne Langille and inspired by the Brooklyn-based impressionistic artist M. P. Landis, was improvised live during a single-day session.

$10 general admission; $8 senior citizens and students; free for members. 

Tickets are no longer available online, but may be available in person on the evening of the performance. On April 20, the Museum will close at 6 pm. The box office will reopen at 7 pm, and the performance space will open at 7:30 pm. No entry after 10 pm.

This performance is free for Members but advance registration is required by emailing memberinfo@whitney.org with your name and membership number.