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Survival Unit III (McPhee / Lonberg-Holm / Zerang)

The Art of Flight: For Alvin Fielder [VINYL + DOWNLOAD]

Survival Unit III (McPhee / Lonberg-Holm / Zerang): The Art of Flight: For Alvin Fielder [VINYL + DO (Astral Spirits)

A fully acoustic set of creative free improvisation from the Survival Unit III trio of Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello, Joe McPhee on tenor saxophone & pocket trumpet and Michael Zerang on percussion, performing at the 2018 The Instigation Festival in New Orleans in a set of concerts that also was drummer Alvin Fielder's last concert, to whom this album is dedicated.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Fred Lonberg-Holm-cello

Joe McPhee-tenor saxophone, pocket trumpet

Michael Zerang-percussion


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Includes numbered color insert with band image & credits

Label: Astral Spirits
Catalog ID: AS127/IR001LP
Squidco Product Code: 31498

Format: LP
Condition: New
Released: 2022
Country: USA
Packaging: LP
Recorded at The Mint during The Instigation Festival, New Orleans on January 25, 2018, by Danny Kadar, Joe Stolarick.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"Astral Spirits and the Instigation Festival are proud to announce the first release on Instigation Records: "The Art of Flight: For Alvin Fielder" by Survival Unit III (Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello), Joe McPhee (tenor saxophone, pocket trumpet), Michael Zerang (percussion).

This set finds the trio breaking new ground - Lonberg-Holm going sans electronics for the first time in Survival Unit III's storied discography - while displaying the mastery of sonic shade and deft interplay that's been their hallmark over the past sixteen plus years.

Beautifully recorded at the New Orleans Jazz Museum during the 2018 Instigation Festival, the night was fittingly historic: Survival Unit III performed the middle set of a three act bill featuring Ken Vandermark's Marker (released as Roadwork 1 on Vandermark's Audiographic imprint) and the final performance of McPhee (filling in last minute for an ill Kidd Jordan) with legendary drummer and beloved AACM elder Alvin Fielder to whom this album is dedicated. That set - with James Singleton on bass to round out the trio - will be released on LP in 2023 as the third title on Instigation Records.

With precious few recordings of Survival Unit III, every new release is a cause for celebration, and a perfect encapsulation of the spirit of the festival: honoring the history by crafting the future.

ABOUT INSTIGATION RECORDS:

Instigation Records serves to release historic documents from the Instigation Festival archive and highlight new work by members of the festival's expansive community. Founded in 2016 by guitarist & improviser Steve Marquette and movement artist Marie Casimir, the Instigation Festival hosts a biannual week of interdisciplinary performance between the Chicago and New Orleans improvised music, movement and video arts communities."


Includes numbered color insert with band image & credits

Artist Biographies

"Fred Lonberg-Holm (born 1962) is an American cellist based in Chicago. He relocated from New York City to Chicago in 1995. Lonberg-Holm is most identified with playing free improvisation and free jazz. He is also a composer of concert works. As a session musician and arranger, he is credited on many rock, pop, and country records. Lonberg-Holm currently leads the Valentine Trio, with Jason Roebke (bass) and Frank Rosaly (drums). This jazz trio performs original compositions as well as tunes by both jazz composers (e.g. Sun Ra) and pop songwriters (e.g. Jeff Tweedy, Syd Barrett). The group released its first album Terminal Valentine, in 2007, which was reviewed by AllAboutJazz critic Nils Jacobson.

He coordinates and directs performances of his Lightbox Orchestra, an improvising ensemble with a flexible, ever-changing membership. Lonberg-Holm does not play an instrument in this group, but rather conducts its non-idiomatic improvisations via the "lightbox" and by holding up handwritten signs. The lightbox contains a light bulb for each musician which Lonberg-Holm switches on or off to suggest when they should play. Collective groups of which Lonberg-Holm is a member include Terminal 4 who released an album, in 2003, called When I'm Falling that received four and a half stars, and AMG Album Pick by Allmusic, and it was reviewed by Allmusic's Joslyn Layne, The Boxhead Ensemble, Pillow, the Lonberg-Holm/Kessler/Zerang trio (with Kent Kessler and Michael Zerang), and the Dörner/Lonberg-Holm duo (with Axel Dörner).

Among groups led by other people, he is a member of the Vandermark 5, the Joe McPhee Trio, the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, Keefe Jackson's Fast Citizens, and Ken Vandermark's Territory Band. When he lived in New York, Lonberg-Holm frequently collaborated with the rock group God Is My Co-Pilot pianist and composer Anthony Coleman as well as multi-instrumentalist Paul Duncan of Warm Ghost. In Chicago, he has worked with Jim O'Rourke, Bobby Conn (on "Llovessonngs" [1999] and "The Golden Age" [2001]), The Flying Luttenbachers, Lake Of Dracula, Wilco, Rivulets, Mats Gustafsson, Sten Sandell, Jaap Blonk, John Butcher, and a great many others.

Lonberg-Holm's concert works have been premiered by William Winant, Carrie Biolo, the Austin New Music Co-Op, Subtropics Ensemble, Duo Atypica, the Schanzer/Speach Duo, New Winds, Paul Hoskin, Kevin Norton, the E.S.P. Ensemble, and others. His scores for dance have been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Dance Theater Workshop as well as many other venues. He is a former composition student of Anthony Braxton and Morton Feldman. He performed improvised music in the role of a troubled composer who finds inspiration in the love of a couple he spots on the street in a short film for the Playboy channel."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Lonberg-Holm)
10/2/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Joe McPhee, born November 3,1939 in Miami, Florida, USA, is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, conceptualist and theoretician. He began playing the trumpet at age eight, taught by his father, himself a trumpet player. He continued on that instrument through his formative school years and later in a U.S. Army band stationed in Germany, at which time he was introduced to performing traditional jazz. Clifford Thornton's Freedom and Unity, released in 1969 on the Third World label, is the first recording on which he appears as a side man. In 1968, inspired by the music of Albert Ayler, he took up the saxophone and began an active involvement in both acoustic and electronic music.

His first recordings as leader appeared on the CJ Records label, founded in 1969 by painter Craig Johnson. These include Underground Railroad by the Joe McPhee Quartet (1969), Nation Time (1970), Trinity (1971) and Pieces of Light (1974). In 1975, Swiss entrepreneur Werner X. Uehlinger release Black Magic Man by McPhee, on what was to become Hat Hut Records.

In 1981, he met composer, accordionist, performer, and educator Pauline Oliveros, whose theories of "deep listening" strengthened his interests in extended instrumental and electronic techniques. he also discovered Edward de Bono's book Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity, which presents concepts for solving problems by "disrupting an apparent sequence and arriving at the solution from another angle." de Bono's theories inspired McPhee to apply this "sideways thinking" to his own work in creative improvisation, resulting in the concept of "Po Music." McPhee describes "Po Music" as a "process of provocation" (Po is a language indicator to show that provocation is being used) to "move from one fixed set of ideas in an attempt to discover new ones." He concludes, "It is a Positive, Possible, Poetic Hypothesis." The results of this application of Po principles to creative improvisation can be heard on several Hat Art recordings, including Topology, Linear B, and Oleo & a Future Retrospective.

In 1997, McPhee discovered two like-minded improvisers in bassist Dominic Duval and drummer Jay Rosen. The trio premiered at the Vision Jazz Festival in 1998 but the concert went unnoticed by the press. McPhee, Duval, and Rosen therefore decided that an apt title for the group would be Trio X. In 2004 he created Survival Unit III with Fred Lonberg-Holm and Michael Zerang to expand his musical horizons and with a career spanning nearly 50 years and over 100 recordings, he continues to tour internationally, forge new connections while reaching for music's outer limits."

-Joe McPhee Website (http://joemcphee.com/bio.html)
10/2/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Michael Zerang was born in Chicago, Illinois, and is a first-generation American of Assyrian decent. He has been a professional musician, composer, and producer since 1976, focusing extensively on improvised music, free jazz, contemporary composition, puppet theater, experimental theater, and international musical forms.

Michael has collaborated with contemporary theater, dance, and other multidisciplinary forms and has received three Joseph Jefferson Awards for Original Music Composition in Theater, in collaboration with Redmoon Theater, in 1996, 1998, and 2000.

As a percussionist and composer, Michael has over eighty titles in his discography and has toured nationally and internationally to 34 countries since 1981, and works with and ever-widening pool of collaborators.

Michael founded and was the artistic director of the Link's Hall Performance Series in Chicago from 1985-1989 where he produced over 300 concerts of jazz, traditional ethnic folk music, electronic music, and other forms of forward thinking music. Michael has been a Board Member of Links Hall Since 1989. He continued to produce concerts at Cafe Urbus Orbis from 1994-1996, and at his own space, The Candlestick Maker in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood, from 2001 - 2005.

Michael has taught as a guest artist at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in performance technique, sound design, and sound/music as it relates to puppetry; rhythmic analysis for dancers at The Dance Center of Columbia College, Northwestern University, and MoMing Dance and Arts Center; courses in Composer/Choreographer Collaborations at Northwestern University; music to children at The Jane Adams Hull House.

Michael currently tours and holds workshops in improvisational music, and teaches private lessons in rhythmic analysis, music composition, and percussion technique.

-Michael Zerang Website (http://www.michaelzerang.com/)
10/2/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



SIDE A



1. Part 1 13:37

2. Part 2 7:15

SIDE B



1. Part 3 10:46

2. Part 4 3:45

3. Part 5 4:23

Related Categories of Interest:


Vinyl Recordings
Physical Releases that include Download Codes
Improvised Music
Jazz
Free Improvisation
NY Downtown & Metropolitan Jazz/Improv
European Improvisation, Composition and Experimental Forms
Chicago Jazz & Improvisation
Trio Recordings
Joe McPhee
Staff Picks & Recommended Items
New in Improvised Music

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Astral Spirits.


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