Guelph Jazz Festival

Announces 2008 Main Stage Concerts

Press Release by: Paul J. Youngman

Venue: River Run Centre (Guelph, On. Canada)

Sept. 5 -7, 2008 - Wednesday, June 4, 2008

GUELPH – The Guelph Jazz Festival will introduce two formidable U.S. acts to local audiences for the first time (John Zorn and Tortoise), along with a 10-person Dutch ensemble (ICP Orchestra) and a returning Japanese pianist and her new quartet (Satoko Fujii ma-do). All five shows will be at the 785-seat Main Stage of the River Run Centre in Guelph, on three successive days: September 5–7, 2008. Here is the Festival's Main Stage lineup, with brief biographies.

• John Zorn's Electric Masada (New York) Sunday, Sept. 7, 2 PM (double bill), River Run Centre Main Stage

"Masada" refers to John Zorn's book of 500-plus brief compositions that, in their deployment of traditional 'Jewish' modes as provocations for improvisation in oft-extreme contexts, are at the core of his exploration of what he calls "Radical Jewish Culture." Electric Masada is perhaps the most active of his ensembles over the past few years. Featuring stellar and by-now-legendary members of the New York's downtown scene, the eight-piece band interprets Zorn's compositions through a canny blend of jazz fusion and contemporary noise music. At the centre of it all, however, are Zorn's razor-sharp conducting and distinctively idiosyncratic saxophone playing – acidic, lyrical, and violent in turn.

• John Zorn's The Dreamers (New York) Sunday, Sept. 7, 2 PM (double bill), River Run Centre Main Stage

The Dreamers is a new suite by the ever-prolific composer for a band with the same personnel as Electric Masada. However, with one particularly crucial switch of instrumentation (vibes in lieu of drums), the sound palette is changed considerably to accommodate Zorn's compositional priorities for this project. Here, he unabashedly mines a feeling of nostalgia, as the ensemble explores material (in a notably accessible way for those familiar with Zorn's work) that draws on surf music, organ-trio jazz, film music, and psychedelia, with Marc Ribot's inimitable guitar playing nearly always at the centre of the music-making.

• International Composers Pool (ICP) Orchestra (Amsterdam) Friday, Sept. 5, 8 PM, (double bill with Satoko Fujii ma-do), River Run Centre Main Stage

Jazz and creative music has always thrived on the productive frictions that result from the differences between key protagonists, and that's the case with the ICP Orchestra of Amsterdam. With the playfully volatile and oft-contradictory duo of Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink at its core for more than 40 years, ICP is now a long-established 10-piece ensemble that features several of the most original voices in creative music. The Orchestra members have wholly absorbed the charmingly unstable and occasionally combative spirit of the Mengelberg/Bennink duo, and use it to animate Mengelberg's brilliant compositions (a mix of jazz, Kurt Weill, old dance steps, and more), Monk, Ellington, collective playing ("instant composing"), and the rest of their expansive repertoire. This is a radical band at the peak of its powers and brimming with outrageous (and outrageously varied) soloists.

• Tortoise (Chicago) Saturday, Sept. 6, 8 PM, River Run Centre Main Stage

This legendary instrumental quintet is considered to be a key progenitor of the post-rock genre. Their much-lauded mid-90s releases (especially Millions Now Living Will Never Die) – featuring twinned bass guitars, tuned percussion, and expansive production – helped to extend the possibilities of conventional rock instrumentation and material. With their wide embrace of musical sources including dub, minimalism, musique concrθte, jazz, and chamber music, Tortoise opened up the field in which the post-rock scene now plays. Their music – propulsive, detailed, and provocatively enigmatic – resounds throughout the current generation of musical experimenters, and will surely do so for generations to come.

• Satoko Fujii ma-do (Tokyo) Friday, Sept. 5, 8 PM, (double bill with ICP Orchestra), River Run Centre Main Stage

Pianist Satoko Fujii last visited Guelph for the 2005 Festival with her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, and the top-flight New York rhythm section of Mark Dresser and Jim Black. Their ma-do quartet is a brand new project that has just recorded in April 2008. We expect tremendous things from Satoko Fujii – as thoughtful, rigorous and expressive an artist as they come in contemporary music.

The remainder of the 15th Anniversary Guelph Jazz Festival Program will be announced on June 23 at an afternoon media and community event. Tickets will go on sale for the 2008 Guelph Jazz Festival and Colloquium on July 2. For more details contact the Guelph Jazz Festival Office.

Special Note:

Festival artistic director Ajay Heble, who suffered a heart attack one week ago on a return flight from Paris, is now recovering at St. Michael's hospital in Toronto, where he was flown last weekend after an emergency landing in Goose Bay, Labrador.

Vish Khanna

GJF Media Coordinator

Guelph Jazz Festival

123 Woolwich St (2nd Floor)

Guelph, ON N1H 3V1

T: (519) 763-4952

F: (519) 763-3155

For more information: Contact: Guelph Jazz Festival office,

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