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| Sam Newsome & Henry Grimes at ABC No Rio COMA On Sunday, July 12, 2015 at 8:00 PM, soprano saxophonist Sam Newsome and legendary bassist Henry Grimes will perform together as a part of the weekly-improvised music series presented by ABC No Rio COMA, located at 156 Rivington Street (between Suffolk & Clinton Streets), two blocks below Houston St., Manhattan (NYC). Newsome, who has made the solo saxophone format a defining component of his musical identity in most recent years will share the bandstand with bassist and multi-instrumentalist Henry Grimes, who has played with such notables as Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Iyler, and has proven to be an important bandleader in his own right. This evening of adventurous improvised music will be a rare musical gathering that's not to be missed. Sam Newsome Newsome first came into prominence on the New York jazz scene as a member of the Terence Blanchard Quintet in the early 1990s. Feeling uninspired by his sound on the tenor, along with his inability to shake his early influences, Newsome traded in the larger tenor saxophone for the smaller more difficult soprano saxophone. This led to him broadening his musical palette with atypical jazz influences through whicht he honed with his band of seven years, Global Unity. Frustrated with trying to keep a working band together, Newsome became attracted to the format of solo saxophone, and began diligently studying the solo works of Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Sonny Rollins, and Anthony Braxton. He hit his artistic stride when he began releasing a series of solo saxophone recordings, including Blue Soliloquy (2010), which was given the distinguished five star ★★★★★ (masterpiece) rating by DownBeat Magazine, and his latest solo saxophone outing, The Straight Horn of Africa: A Path to Liberation – The Art of the Soprano, Vol. 2 (2014), which received ★★★★ 1/2 stars in DownBeat and was described by DownBeat writer Ed Enright as "a modern masterpiece." Henry Grimes Now in his 80th year, Henry Grimes (double bass, violin, poetry) is a progenitor and architect of the "avant-jazz" or "free jazz" movement of the 1950s and '60s, having created new music alongside Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Coleman Hawkins, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, and more. But a trip to the West Coast went awry, leaving Henry in downtown L.A. at the end of the '60s with a broken bass he couldn't pay to repair, so he faded away from the music world. Discovered there in 2002, Grimes was given a bass by William Parker and very soon was back in full force. Since then, Henry has played / toured / recorded with Rashied Ali, Marshall Allen, Marilyn Crispell, Bobby Few, Edward "Kidd" Jordan, Roscoe Mitchell, Marc Ribot, Wadada Leo Smith, and more. Since 2003, Grimes has played nearly 600 concerts in 30 countries, made his professional debut on violin at age 70 with Cecil Taylor at Lincoln Center, published the first volume of his poetry, and illustrates his new recordings and publications. write your comments about the article :: © 2015 Jazz News :: home page |