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| Jason Kao Hwang Trio in Beacon 5/26 + Burning Bridge @ the Vision Fest 5/31 May 26, Friday, 8pm HowlandCultural Center 477 Main St. in Beacon, NY; (845) 831-4988 Jason Kao Hwang Trio with Michael T.A Thompson(drum set), Anders Nilsson (guitar/electronics), and Jason Kao Hwang (violin/viola/electronics) Presented by Elysium Furnace Works Wednesday, May 31, 8:30pm VISION FESTIVAL 22 Judson Memorial Church 55 Washington Square South, NYC (bet. Sullivan and Thompson St.) Jason Kao Hwang/BURNING BRIDGE Jason Kao Hwang (composer/violin), Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet), Joseph Daley (tuba), Andrew Drury (drum set), Ken Filiano (string bass), Sun Li (pipa), Steve Swell (trombone), Wang Guowei (erhu) NYC Premiere of Blood, a composition by Jason Kao Hwang blood meditates upon the emotional traumas of war retained within the body as unspoken vibrations that reverberate throughout communities and across generations. Through blood the violence of deeply held memories are not relived but transposed into our sound and liberated into song. blood in our sound rises within our voice to protest and defy humanity's constant state of war. blood regenerates and flows to entrain an infinite spectrum of waves into wholeness and strength. One evening, while driving down an unlit highway, my headlights flashed upon the bleeding carcass of a deer. My heart rate thundered and air abandoned my lungs with explosive force as I swerved away, narrowly avoiding a collision. This shock to the senses made me reflect upon my mother's harrowing experiences during World War II in China. She was in a pharmacy that was bombed by the Japanese. Knocked unconscious, she awoke as the lone survivor surrounded by the dead. I also thought about the musicians who fought in Viet Nam, like Billy Bang and Butch Morris. The magnitude of pain and sorrow that they endured is unimaginable. Extreme danger triggers powerful, diametrically opposed forces, "fight or flight". This conflict can produce an immobility response, which penetrates and remains within the body as emotional trauma. Similarly, when a bomb explodes, there is blast wave outward that leaves a near vacuum in its wake. This is filled by an equally deadly blast wind in the opposite direction. Within an explosion, blood was created. Violinist Jason Kao Hwang stands at the crossroads of his influences - classical, jazz and traditional Chinese music - and sets the divisions between them ablaze. DOWNBEAT, Shaun Brady Hwang has his finger firmly on the racing pulse of the 21st century, where everything interconnected and boundaries of time and geography seem hopelessly quaint. If there is a war cry for music of the new millennium, it might well be: Burn the bridges – there's no going back. Stephen Brookes, The Washington Post In the complexity and richness of these compositions, the sense of how accomplished Hwang—and all these musicians—are as instrumentalists can easily be lost... Burning Bridge is both a transcendent and challenging experience, and with repeated listening the characteristics of each movement can shift in emphasis, and become reinvented. All About Jazz, Karl Ackerman 6pm Vision Youth Orchestra 7pm Whit Dickey/Matt Maneri/Matthew Ship 8pm K.J Holmes/Jeremy Carlstedt 8:30pm Jason Kao Hwang/Burning Bridge 9:40pm Tracie Morris/Marvin Sewell 10pm Charles Gayle Trio write your comments about the article :: © 2017 Jazz News :: home page |