Int'l Soc. for Improvised Music Conference Features Karl Berger in Keynote Panel

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The International Society for Improvised Music (ISIM) 2012 Festival/Conference, convening February 16-19, 2012 at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ, will kick-off 9am Friday morning with a distinquished Keynote Panel featuring Karl Berger (founder and director, Creative Music Foundation/Creative Music Studio), and Douglas Ewart (Chair, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), moderated by Ed Sarath (President, ISIM).

Saturday events conclude with an evening festival concert directed by Karl Berger with the 25-member University of Michigan Creative Arts Orchestra. A key component of this concert will be the CMS model of a site-specific open workshop followed by a complete orchestral performance.

The panel's presentations and discussions will focus on the interactions that took place between members of CMS and AACM during the 70s and 80s, and the repercussions that are still being felt today. The inspiration for this panel was the on-going cross-pollination between Creative Music Studio and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. AACM members, including Douglas Ewart, Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, Leo Smith, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and many more, regularly lead sessions at CMS as 'Guiding Artists.'

"The discussions concerning the philosophies that governed CMS and AACM should prove to be of great interest to the new generation of improvisers today, " said Berger, who has been actively developing improvised orchestras for the past forty years. He is launching a new series - Karl Berger's Improvisers Orchestra - beginning in March at NYC's Jazz Gallery. He recently completely a successful eight month Monday night series at The Stone in NYC's East Village, which featured an 18+ piece orchestra of extraordinary improvisers exploring original themes, melodies from world traditions, spontaneous musical ideas, and compositions from such iconic artists as Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Ingrid Sertso whose uncanny vocals and inspiring poetry is one of the orchestra's trademarks. The orchestra often enjoys national/international guest soloists.

Berger is the co-founder, with Ornette Coleman and Ingrid Sertso, of the legendary Creative Music Studio (CMS) and its parent organization, the Creative Music Foundation. His "Music Mind" concept developed over decades at CMS, deepens the experience of playing and listening to music while focusing on attention, expression and communication, and introduces a new approach to harmonizing improvised sound for orchestral explorations.

Fellow panel participant Douglas R. Ewart is a composer, improviser, sculptor and maker of masks and instruments. He was chairman of the internationally renowned Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), one of the foremost groups of musicians who changed the face of improvised music from the 1970's on.

Moderator Ed Sarath, is a flugelhornist, composer, professor of music and founding faculty in the Department Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation at The University of Michigan School of Music. He is President of The International Society for Improvised Music (ISIM) which promotes performance, education, and research in improvised music, and illuminates connections between musical improvisation and creativity across fields.

Karl Berger is an award-winning composer/arranger, winner of six Downbeat Critics Polls as a jazz soloist, the mastermind behind the legendary Creative Music Studio and the emergence of spontaneously arranged confluences of individual improvisational expressions and world musical traditions that is the CMS trademark. His recordings and world-wide performances included musicians from the jazz tradition such as Dave Holland, Ed Blackwell, Graham Haynes, Bob Stewart, Kenny Wessel, and from world musical backgrounds such as Steve Gorn, Nana Vasconcelos, Ismet Siral, Hozan Yamamoto. He collaborated with Don Cherry, Gunter Schuller, the Mingus Epitaph Orchestra, just to name a few.

Karl Berger now records for the Tzadik label.His writing credits include orchestral arrangements for recordings by Jeff Buckley, Angela Kidjo, Better Than Ezra, The Cardigans, many collaborations with producer Bill Laswell and the groundbreaking orchestral composition "No Man Is An Island". Karl Berger and Friends continue to present residencies world-wide, notably in Italy, Germany, Istanbul and Brazil.

During the '70- and '80's, the Woodstock-based Creative Music Studio was considered the premier study center for contemporary creative music. Founded in 1971 by Karl Berger, Ingrid Sertso and Ornette Coleman, CMS brought together leading innovators in the jazz and world music communities. Unprecedented in its range and diversity, CMS was an acknowledged phenomenon in the international music world, providing participants with the rare opportunity to interact personally with the musical giants of improvisation and musical thought on a daily basis.

CMS is credited as the birthplace of Worldjazz - the improvisational and compositional expansion of the world's musical traditions. Now one of the main driving forces in many styles of music, this concept was pioneered very early at CMS, guided by authentic leaders. Hundreds of live concerts were recorded, many heralded as landmark performances. Thousands of workshops, master classes, concerts and colloquia inspired a generation of musicians who took with them the ideas, concepts and practices developed at CMS. The CMS community still exists in a remarkable network of creative musicians, many of whom came to CMS from Asia, Europe and South America.

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