Tag Archives: the roost

Local Don’t Mean Yokel (Part 3): Mark Weaver

Mark Weaver. Photo by Heather Trost.

Mark Weaver. Photo by Heather Trost.

The New Mexico Jazz Festival and the New Mexico Jazz Workshop’s summer jazz and blues series bring stellar talent to town. This year we’ve got the likes of NEA Jazz Masters Dave Holland, Charles Lloyd, and Dr. Lonnie Smith just for starters at the festival, and Brian Lynch and Matt Savage are among the stars lighting up the NMJW series.

The festival and summer series also offer top-drawer musicians in New Mexico an opportunity to perform in listening rooms and on stages where their music does not have to compete with bar chatter and the clink of silverware on china. This three-part series features ear-worthy local (or formerly local) acts stepping into the spotlight in the coming weeks. This final installment features tuba player/composer Mark Weaver and his UFO Ensemble, with original band member George Lane on trumpet, Micah Hood on trombone, and Rick Compton on drums. Continue reading

The Return of the Shocking

Pray for Brain

Pray for Brain opens the sixth annual edition of The Roost.

OK, it’s not really shocking (I couldn’t resist echoing the previous post’s title), but it is definitely out of the ordinary: The Roost, Albuquerque’s creative music series, founded, curated, and
produced by Mark Weaver.

Weaver, who hangs out in the lower registers, notably on the tuba and didgeridoo, has an
omnivorous appetite for musical genres. He plays regularly in a trad jazz trio and an edgy,
unclassifiable banjo/tuba duo, as well as a wide variety of irregular aggregations that explore the far reaches of improvisational possibilities. He feels strongly that all varieties of out-of-the-ordinary music deserve a place to call home, and so he founded The Roost, which has
presented several weeks of creative sounds at summer’s end for the last five years. Continue reading

Brian Haas: The Simple Made Profound

A couple of Sundays ago, I attended a concert in The Roost series here in Albuquerque, and
afterward, I did something that music journalists rarely do: I bought the CD. I could have gotten a review copy from the publicist, but I didn’t want to wait that long. I wanted to listen to it in the car on the way home. Lucky for me, the price was right.CoverArt-Haas-Chamberlain-Frames

The artist was pianist/composer Brian Haas, who is touring the country in support of his upcoming release, Frames, a collection of 11 compositions for piano and drums. The tour will take him around the country playing the music with several different drummers over the next few months. Here in New Mexico, he played with Dave Wayne, a stalwart on the progressive music scene. They improvised freely on and between the album’s tunes, and they had a blast doing it. We in the audience had a blast, too.

Frames, Brian Haas and Matt Chamberlain (The Royal Potato Family/Kinnara Records)
Frames, the third release from pianist/composer Brian Haas under his own name, presents 11 brief but thoroughly engaging through-composed pieces for piano and drums. Written by Haas, they’re performed by him and Grammy-winning drummer Matt Chamberlain, with
assistance from Peter Tomshany (guitar), producer Costas Stasinopoulos (synths/
programming), and Chris Combs (synths). Best-known as a founding member of the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, Haas pulls from a wide range of influences stretching from Prokofiev to James P. Johnson, from Philip Glass to Flying Lotus, to paint a picture of an imagined life in a succession of sonic images stretching from birth to death and beyond.

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The Roost: Consort Un-Caged

Perfectly Un-Matched

If you had been asked to put together two musicians for a freewheeling exploration of time, texture, and space, flutist Dana Reilly and drummer Rick DiZenzo would probably not have been the two who leapt to mind. The classically trained Reilly, a Denver native with a taste for
J. S. Bach and Frank Martin, had been steeped in the tradition of rigorous etudes and the
autocracy of sheet music. DiZenzo, a Jersey boy who prefers Frank Zappa, had pounded his drum kit into submission at CBGB’s, an iconic New York rock club.

CuC Roost Promo Photo

They both, however, harbored a secret desire to play their own music without regard to current trends. So when their paths crossed in a flute ensemble over three years ago, they made a break for it and formed Consort Un-Caged. Sunday night, as part of The Roost series, curated by Mark Weaver, they’ll present Altered Time, a collection of—to quote their promo material—“original compositions that refuse to be categorized, boxed-in . . . or caged.”

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