International Arts Initiatives and Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in association with LIVE Biennial of Performance Art

presents

Terry Riley with Michael McClure

Saturday January 20, 2006, 8:00pm
Chan Centre for the Performing Arts

Tickets available online at

phone 604 280 3311
or at the Chan Ticket Office (in person only)

“Terry Riley is the best kind of artist for our time and all times, the real thing. He changed the very complexion of music, yet his masterful work ranges far beyond the historical moment he defines. Usually music, dance, art open up some feeling, cause some reaction, but Terry’s work changes how you perceive things all the time. And yes, have we mentioned? He’s one hell of a piano player!” - Zakir Hussain

California composer and revered keyboard virtuoso, Terry Riley, launched what is now known as the Minimalist Movement with his revolutionary composition "In C” in 1964. This seminal work provided a new concept in musical form based on interlocking repetitive patterns. Its impact was to change the course of 20th Century music and its influence has been heard in the works of prominent composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams and in the music of rock groups such as The Who, The Soft Machine, Tangerine Dream, Curved Air, and many others.

In a unique collaboration, Riley’s hypnotic, multi-layered, polymetric, eastern-flavored improvisations compliment the words and mesmerizing voice of one of the founders of the literary Beat Generation - San Francisco poet Michael McClure. Together they fuse electronica, spoken word poetry, and improvised jazz piano in a real marriage between two masters of psychedelia.

Poetry read to jazz tradition first came into being at a 1955 poetry reading at The Six Gallery in San Francisco at which Allan Ginsberg first presented "Howl" - the event seen in retrospect as the beginning of the emerging Beat movement and the roots of rebirth of contemporary spoken word performance. In 2004 Terry and Michael released their first collaborative album, I LIKE YOUR EYES LIBERTY.

Riley's performances are easier to experience than to explain. He is a musician of enormous sophistication and technical ability, a musician who finds the center of tones and enters into them in the genuine hope of discovering something essential about the lifting of our spirits ... This is music derived from many parts of the globe and from different eras. It has the improvisatory flair, the rhythmic exhilaration and the melodic subtly of the music of India, which Riley has studied for decades. But it is also grounded in classical tradition and jazz, in the advanced keyboard techniques of Chopin, in the harmonic richness of the Impressionists, in the ecstatic improvisations of Coltrane.
The Los Angeles Times

www.terryriley.com

Terry Riley Press Quotes and Discography

Michael McClure Biography

Michael McClure from The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters

Six Poets at Six Gallery

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