Who Knows Where It’s Cooler

Join HEARding Cats Collective artists Rich O’Donnell and Anna Lum for a special appearance at the 30th Annual Birmingham Improvisor Festival.  The duo will perform an original work, entitled “Who Knows Where It’s Cooler” featuring O’Donnell on seesaw drums, and Lum reading poetry.

Also on the bill for the evening are several friends of HEARding Cats, including percussionist and performer Gino Robair, and cellist Craig Hultgren.

If you’re in the area, don’t miss this special evening of improvisation and fresh poetic perspectives!

HEARding Cats Gelatin Orchestra
Sunday, June 27, 2010 – 2 pm
University City Library
6701 Delmar Blvd
Free and open to the public

HCC invites adventurous souls to come worship with us at the U-City library on Sunday, June 27 for the STRANGE and WONDERFUL sounds of HEARding Cats Gelatin Orchestra.  Featuring the sometimes-erratic, often ecstatic, always fantastic Tory Z Starbuck on koto; see-saw drumming, tam-tam strumming, percussion-cunning Rich O’Donnell; brilliant all the while, and never short on style, Zimbabwe Nkenya; the pseudo-scientific alchemist of the analog Doc Mabuse; painter of the airwaves Venus Slick on electronics; and on the ‘Ramone-a-phone’ (playing the parts of Tommy, Paco, Isolde, and Holofernes Ramone) his holiness, Msgr. Thomas Sutter.

The aforementioned will be a non-denominational service, during which believers in consonant melodies, regular tempos, and repetitive rhythms are guaranteed to have their “faces melted off” by the improvisatory (and mostly blasphemous, depending on your perspective) interjections of the Gelatin Orchestra.

When asked to describe the aesthetic in his own words, galactic-cat Tory Z Starbuck said, “It will be more of a Hearding Cats Gelatin Orchestra…where several of us experimental musicians ‘gel’ as opposed to ‘jam’ (which is what rock musicians do when they get together).  We would not ALL just start making noise right away but ‘pockets of us’ would improvise…some of us would leave the muzik area and others would take the place.  Meow.”

HEARding Cats Gelatin Orchestra – poisoning the minds of otherwise innocent people since 2010.

Join HEARding Cats Collective artists Rich O’Donnell, Doc Mabuse, Tory Z Starbuck, and Zimbabwe Nkenya this Thursday, June 10 in Strauss Park for STRANGE and WONDERFUL sounds in the park.  The four will create an improvised soundscape combining electronic and acoustic instruments in solo to quartet arrangements.  Instrumentation includes: O’Donnell on self-invented percussion (tubalums, hummers, unidentified bowing objects, tam-array), Mabuse (analog synthesizer), Starbuck (synthesizer and wind instruments), Nkenya (psaltery and kalimba).

In addition to the creative soundscape, aerialists from Circus Flora will perform in the park, as well as cubist dancing provided by Atrek Dance Company.

Come join the cool cats for the fun at Strauss Park, this Thursday in Grand Center!

New Music Circle vets create new avant-garde music organization

(from The West End Word by Njaimeh Njie – February 03, 2010)

There’s a lot in a name. In the case of the Hearding Cats Collective, there’s even more to the people behind it.

Four cats make up this particular herd, and they’ve made it a point to roam free.

In November 2009 Rich O’Donnell, his wife, Anna Lum, and friends Mike Murphy and Ryan Harris created the Hearding Cats Collective, an organization that wants to promote avant-garde music and the people who play it. They aim to provide a platform for local musicians and artists to share their work, and to foster collaborations with national and international talent.

Hearding Cats’ story begins with Rich O’Donnell. The St. Louis native began playing the drums when he was 7 and went on to a more than 40-year career as a percussionist with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. “It was my passion, it’s what I followed,” O’Donnell recalls.

In the 1960s O’Donnell’s musical curiosity pushed him to begin making his own instruments, and it also led him to join the New Music Circle. Founded in 1959, NMC has become an institution in the avant-garde music world.

O’Donnell had chaired NMC’s Music Committee for many years. During that time he brought Lum into the organization, as well as fellow instrument-maker Murphy and former student Harris.

Lum, Murphy, and Harris served on NMC’s Board of Directors with O’Donnell until last year, when they ran into what they each described as “philosophical differences” with NMC leadership.

“There was a disagreement over musical development,” says Gary Gronau, a former NMC president and 40-year veteran who is still with the organization.

Recognizing the creative and professional differences emerging between himself and NMC, O’Donnell decided to leave the organization. “If there’s an orthodoxy beginning to emerge he goes against it,” Murphy says of O’Donnell. It was not as easy for Lum, who had to part with the six-figure endowment she had been so instrumental in creating.

However, Lum eventually decided “integrity’s more important than dollars.”

Murphy and Harris agreed, and from there the idea for Hearding Cats was conceived. O’Donnell, Lum, Murphy and Harris knew they wanted to make good music, but they also realized how unique the music they love is.

Rooted in improvisation, avant-garde musicians perform by reading each other or “clowning”—a skill both Murphy and O’Donnell describe as an almost psychic capability.

Murphy compares playing avant-garde music to speaking in a language that no one has heard before. He acknowledges a listener “may not understand the context or the idiom, but you know something serious is going on there.”

Each concert and jam session is “something that’s never existed before, and won’t exist like that again,” Harris says.

“It’s not predictable…it’s exploratory,” O’Donnell adds. Despite their passion and commitment for their craft, the founders of Hearding Cats recognize that what they do isn’t for everyone.

O’Donnell stresses that Hearding Cats won’t judge their success by audience size. Instead they want to help musicians perform and promote their music, and will aim to cater to anyone who is willing to approach avant-garde music with an open mind.

Even with this quality-over-quantity approach O’Donnell, Lum, Murphy and Harris agree that it takes more than determination to run a successful organization. It takes public interest, marketing and money.

Hearding Cats is looking at ways to get the public, especially students, interested and involved with the art they promote. They say they are thinking about seminars, workshops, concerts and classes that will have both educational and entertainment components.

O’Donnell’s status as a legendary musician among avant-garde artists in the U.S. and beyond has been a helpful marketing tool for Hearding Cats thus far.  O’Donnell says he takes pride in the multicultural avant-garde music community and the eclectic essence of the music, and hopes the organization can bring different people and music from a range of cultures together.

And of finances, Hearding Cats plans to seek grant money and support from local art institutions. Until they find outside funding, O’Donnell and Lum are financing all of the group’s expenses out-of-pocket.

Gronau says that the current members of the New Music Circle understand that having two avant-garde organizations in St. Louis will mean changes for it, and the group is currently brainstorming what those will be and how to implement them.

Still, “anything that provides more innovative art for St. Louis is a good thing,” Gronau says. “Hopefully this city is big enough for the both of us.”

With years of experience and a love for the music, the founders of Hearding Cats are looking forward to creating something new. “My interest in life is to explore the line between what is and what could be,” O’Donnell says.

With that philosophy, Hearding Cats is looking forward to being on the cutting edge of music and art for a long time to come.

Tory Z Starbuck - photo by Brian Fagnani

Ethnic Muzik for Non-Existent Countries
Thursday, Feb. 18 – 8 pm
Off-Broadway
3511 Lemp
Tickets: $8 / $5 students/starving artists

HEARding Cats Collective is working tirelessly to keep St. Louis “strange and wonderful” for all you art music lovers.  Ethnic Music for Non-Existent Countries is a whacked-out avant-electronic music and performance art event that combines the bizarre creations of kyma/pacarana electronics with traditional Asian instruments.  The evening will feature the debut of a new trio of veteran musicians headed by longtime St. Louis artist Tory Z Starbuck (electric koto, suona, and yang qin), in collaboration with Rich O’Donnell (Asian gongs, tam-tam, X-R drums), and Deb Summers (amplified yang qin).  The music will be improvised, extolling an aural conversation between the three artists.  O’Donnell is sure to “bang a gong” while Starbuck and Summers play double-qinned music indeed…

After a short intermission, Starbuck on kyma/pacarana electronics will be joined by the spontaneous interjections of Cherokee-Lemp performance artist Jeffrey Miller.  Their creation is sure to surprise and shock.

Starbuck, a prolific art-creating, multi-instrumentalist has long operated on the fringes of the St. Louis music scene.  He fuses Bowie/Eno influenced art rock ideas with Stockhausen/Subotnick influenced electro-acoustic soundscapes and Asian folk music. He has appeared on more than 100 albums over the last three decades – many of which have been self produced.

O’Donnell, a virtuoso percussionist, inventor and innovator of electronic and acoustic instruments, and retired St. Louis Symphony Orchestra musician will keep listeners guessing (“How did he do that?”) with a combination of self-created instruments and electronic processing.  He’s played with artists ranging from Iannis Xenakis to Yo Yo Ma to Alvin Lucier and Vinny Golia.  His work is recognized internationally, and has received rave reviews in The Wire as well as Village Voice.

Deb Summers is a multi-instrumentalist and licensed music therapist in and around St. Louis.  She’s played in groups ranging from punk bands to chamber ensembles over the last 30 years.  “Whence came my obsession with sound?  I know not… only that I HEARd it…. and was drawn into the molecular dance of atoms…. becoming fully entangled in the mesh.”

Jeffrey Miller has an extensive background in the study of mineral deposit formations and the effects said formations have on cats.  This experience has been of remarkable use in the herding of cats.  Forthcoming books on the subject will be available in stores soon.

Rich O’Donnell, a mainstay in St. Louis’ avant-garde music scene for the last half century, has been tinkering again…

For this concert, entitled 2-1/3 Step-Crawl listeners will experience the fruits of his instrumental creation, invented over a lifetime of experimentation.  O’Donnell (“HaZBeeN”) will be joined in performance by the dynamic percussion duo, HaZMaT, which features local phenoms Matt Henry and Thomas Zirkle.

Some instruments O’Donnell created as early as 1969, and many grew out of St. Louis culture and experiences: Sprahng II, ODO and Hyper/ODO drums, tubalums, hummers, “clowns“, X-R drums, and “un-identified bowing objects.”  Over the years he’s reconfigured and adapted the instruments in a continuous timbral exploration, and has even created new instruments for this concert.  Some require playing with altered standard techniques, and some demand a wholly unique playing style.

O’Donnell spent 43 years with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra – most of that time as principal percussionist.  He has been active professionally around the globe outside of the symphony in the creative music realm for many years as well.  He travels frequently to play with renowned performers on the east and west coats, and introduced free-improv to China in 2007 with a five city tour.  O’Donnell’s “seesaw drumming” technique received rave reviews worldwide on two recent releases, including the late Leroy Jenkins’ The Art of Improvisation (Jenkins’ final album), and Tom Hamilton’s Local Customs.  He has played and recorded with John Butcher, Leroy Jenkins, Vinny Golia, and David Wessel, among many others.

Matt Henry and Thomas Zirkle, PhD are highly talented percussionists in their own right.  Henry is the director of percussion studies at UMSL; Zirkle the director of music at Forest Park Community College.  Henry is particularly adept in the drumming traditions of Africa and Latin America.  He holds a Bachelor’s in Music Performance from UMSL, and a Master’s in Orchestral Performance from Webster University.  Dr. Zirkle holds degrees from Ball State University, SIU-Carbondale, and Louisiana State University.  He has traveled worldwide playing and researching the percussion traditions of different cultures, including a Fulbright Delegation to China in 2005.  He is an active clinician, private instructor, and composer.  Henry and Zirkle both perform regularly solo, and with their percussion duo HaZMaT, as well as the latin jazz band “Musica Slesa.”

Ravish Momin’s Trio Tarana
Sunday, Mar. 21, 2010 – 7:30 pm
Kranzberg Art Center
510 N. Grand
Admission: $15

“What Momin posits here is a fresh, forward-thinking aesthetic that reaches beyond standard east-west jazzology or identikit exotica; his playing on a very non-standard kit, comprising of cajon and talking drums as well as traps, are of a man on a quest for novel musical narratives as well as novel sounds.”- Kevin Le Gendre (Jazzwise UK)

Ravish Momin’s Trio Tarana, formed  in 2003, is led by percussionist/composer Ravish Momin, born in India, while currently residing in New York City.  Violinist Skye Steel, and Greg Heffernan (cello, electronics) round out the group.  Their last stop in St. Louis came nearly 5 years ago, and the trio has been busy trotting the globe playing festivals ever since!  The St. Louis stop for HEARding Cats will be one of only a handful of North American tour dates in 2010.

The trio features the unique instrumentation of violin, cello, and percussion, and primarily utilizes East-Asian rhythms (including Indian, Japanese, Afghani), Middle-Eastern and North African rhythms as the foundation for a new creative musical experience.  Click the following link for a video clip of a Trio Tarana piece based around a 13/8 rhythmic cycle, entitled Tehrah.

Momin cut his jazz teeth performing/recording with members of the  Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).  The AACM was co-founded in the 1960s by tenor-saxophonist legend Kalaparush Maurice McIntrye and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. The AACM initial membership also included Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, Leroy Jenkins (with whom HEARding Cats founder Rich O’Donnell recorded the album Leroy Jenkins Driftwood: The Art of Improvisation), Lester Bowie and other influential performers who clung to the adage “Ancient to the Future,” and still continue to explore the boundaries of jazz.  Inspired by their music, Ravish has kept on developing Trio Tarana, continuing to search across various world music genres. Lately, he has managed to re-invent the band with a brand-new line up, as well as introducing the element of electronics to create lush ambient soundscapes and other-worldly textures.

They had released a critically acclaimed debut entitled “Climbing the Banyan Tree” in 2004, on the Portugal-based CleanFeed Record Label.  Of their debut CD, AllAboutJazz.com had said: “It is fair to say that Trio Tarana is without precedent in the world of improvised music. A true synthesis of North African, South and East Asian motifs with classical organization and the immediacy of free improvisation has probably not existed prior to “Climbing the Banyan Tree.”

The trio has recently performed at  The Calgary Jazz Festival (Canada, 2009), Jazz Lent (Maribor, Slovenia, 2009), Cultural Festival Zacatecas (Mexico 2009), Jazz Ao Centro Festival (Coimbra, Portugal, 2008), and also toured China and the UK.  They’ve performed at New York City’s Rubin Museum of Asian Art on multiple occasions, and most notably, at the Yardbird Suite Jazz Club (Edmonton, Canada, 2007), Detroit Institute of Art (US, 2006),  Mediawave Festival (Hungary, 2006), the Jazzin’ Tondela (Portugal, 2005), the prestigious Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery (Washington, DC, 2005), the New Music Circle (St. Louis, MO, 2005),  9th Annual Asian American Jazz Festival (Chicago, IL, 2004), the Taipei Arts Festival (Taiwan, 2004), amongst other performances.  They have also been recently featured in TimeOUT Magazines (London, Lisbon, HongKong and Chicago), ‘Village Voice’ (New York), ‘Jazz.pt’ (Portugal) and in ‘JazzImprov’ (France), Redstar  Magazine (China) amongst various other domestic and international publications.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity!

*bio and press info taken from www.ravishmomin.com.

R D Zurick
Emails from Bangkok
Featuring Ashley Tate, Anna Lum, Robert Fishbone, and Ricky Heenan
Sunday, Mar. 28, 2010 – 7:30 pm
Winifred Moore Auditorium
470 E. Lockwood
Co-sponsored by Webster Film Series
Admission: $8 regular, $5 seniors/students

R D Zurick has been working in experimental film and video for four decades.  He’s shown locally at the Pulitzer Foundation and Webster Film Series, and internationally throughout Thailand and in Shanghai.

Emails from Bangkok, co-sponsored by Webster Film Series, is a multimedia event that features live dance, music, and tai chi, in which Zurick pulls together a talented array of St. Louisans for an evening of spectacular visual and sonic art.  Additional collaborators include dancer Ashley Tate, tai chi master Anna Lum, musician Robert Fishbone, and an ensemble to play ethnic Thai music assembled by ranad ek player Ricky Heenan.  Zurick will show a total of 5 videos, including two North American premiers: Meditation on Maeya; PANSiAM*; Blue Khmer; Ballet Penile*; White Wat (* indicates North American premier screening).  PANSiAM will receive its world premier on January 17, 2010 at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center.

Conceptually, Emails from Bangkok arose from Zurick’s quest to connect with two, very famous, Thai artists: Khun Chalermchai and Bruce Gaston.  On a 30-day journey to Thailand in 2007, Zurick sought a meeting with the artists to ask their permission for the use of their work on a video he was creating, entitled White Wat (which will be shown in Emails from Bangkok).  Over the course of his travels, Zurick wrote three emails to friends in the United States which documented his journey.  These emails will be used as a narrative, read by Zurick live during the event and interspersed between films.

In Zurick’s words, “My videos grew out of a musical relationship with film as I held out for film far too long. I finally succumbed to video at the turn of the millennium when I could see the musical possibilities not with rock video but with the computerized editing systems…I have always seen film like music and my movies were really single-framed epics that corresponded to the beats of music I would then later apply.

The young Thai musician Ricky Heenan will create live accompaniment to open the show on the ranad ek, along with fellow musicians on hand drums, and ching.  Ashley Tate, Artistic Director of Ashleyliane Dance Company, and a Grand Center Visionary Award Recipient, will accompany Meditation on Maeya with live dance.  Anna Lum will serve as projection screen on PANSiAM as the film’s images are displayed on her body.  Finally, local multi-instrumentalist Robert Fishbone will create live music on electric dulcimer for Ballet Penile.

We hope you will join HEARding Cats for this special evening of film, music, and dance that’s sure to raise STRANGE and WONDERFUL questions…

Konk Pack
Friday, Apr. 9, 2010 – 7:30 pm
Kerr Foundation Building (For a map of the Kerr Foundation, click here.)
21 O’Fallon St.
Admission: $15 / $7 students, artists

If you missed them in 2007, then don’t repeat the same mistake!  Konk Pack, a triplet of veteran European improvisers features unique instrumentation: drumset/found-percussion (Roger Turner), lapsteel/electronics/reeds (Tim Hodgkinson), and analog synth (Thomas Lehn) amalgamized into a poly-structural explosion of abstract soundscapes.
Though formed in 1997, the members of Konk Pack have ranked among the elite of European free-improvisers for four decades.  Between them, they’ve played with everyone from Derek Bailey to Fred Frith to Tuvan throat-singers.  Hodgkinson co-founded the legendary 60s and 70s avant-rock group Henry Cow, which played with Pink Floyd and toured with Captain Beefheart.  Konk Pack has toured extensively through Europe, UK, and North America, they’ve performed live for BBC’s “Mixing It,” and have received rave reviews for their recorded (GROB label out of Cologne, Germany) and live performances in such esteemed publications as The Wire and Coda Magazine. They’ve been featured at many of the finest European music festivals.

Konk Pack’s sound has been described as “music in which a barrage of discreet particles bounced around, colliding in a universe in which chance and interactivity blurred into one another” (Coda), and likewise “utterly awesome…with startling combinations of punkish nuisance, ingenious change-ups, and rolling, stumbling, tripping and flipping sound inventions” (The Wire).

Don’t miss the opportunity to explore a continuously and presently evolving musical moment from fine artisans of the improvised-craft.

For more info, please visit www.myspace.com/konkpack, or http://thomaslehn.de/read/info_kp.html.

Kyle Bruckmann and Rich O’Donnell
Thursday, Jun. 3, 2010 – 8:00 pm
Joe’s Café
6014 Kingsbury Ave.
Admission: $5 for Joe’s Cafe members ($10 for non-members)

Remember, BYOB!

Creative music masters Kyle Bruckmann (oboe), and Rich O’Donnell (seesaw percussion, kyma/pacarana electronics) take the stage at Joe’s Cafe for an evening of true improvisation.  The pair, though exceptionally skilled at the language of free improv have never actually played together prior to this show.  This sort of disconnect only adds excitement to the allure of the strange and wonderful soundscape that awaits those listeners who venture to Joe’s Cafe for the concert.

With a history of conservatory training gone awry, oboist and electronic musician Kyle Bruckmann combines the rigorous discipline of a classical foundation with raucous sensibilities more indebted to punk’s aftermath in a dizzying variety of artistic endeavors. He has performed throughout the U.S. and in Europe as a composer, an interpreter, and an improviser and has appeared on more than 40 albums of various genres.

Long-term affiliations include EKG, an electroacoustic duo with Ernst Karel, and the experimental “rock” monstrosity Lozenge.  Bruckmann’s quintet Wrack performs original compositions drawing equally from the traditions of contemporary jazz and classical modernism, cultivating an “ability to combine turned-up flame with clear-headed attention to texture and space” (Jason Bivins, Dusted Magazine). As a member of the Bay Area new music collective sfSound and of Gene Coleman’s Chicago-based Ensemble Noamnesia.

Upon moving to San Francisco in 2003, he joined forces with sfSound and with Quinteto Latino, a wind quintet repeatedly selected for the San Francisco Symphony’s acclaimed Adventures in Music educational program. Current Bay Area working groups include Shudder (with Lance Grabmiller and Phillip Greenlief), Ghost in the House (with David Michalak, Tom Nunn, and Karen Stackpole) and Pink Mountain (an outrock band with Sam Coomes, Gino Robair, Scott Rosenberg, and John Shiurba).

Rich O’Donnell is a longtime St. Louis new music aficionado, composer, virtuoso performer, and inventor of percussion instruments, techniques (seesaw drumming), and electronic instruments.  He played with the St. Louis Symphony, mostly as principal percussionist for 43 years until his retirement.  His seesaw drumming invention has created a wholly unique and new percussion language that transcends the term “extended technique.”  The palette of textures and color that O’Donnell obtains with his humble setup speaks volumes about his ability as a player.

He has traveled the globe performing (including a 5 city tour of China in which he introduced free-improv), and has recently collaborated with many of the finest creative musicians on the planet, including John Butcher, Leroy Jenkins, David Wessel, Denman Maroney, Vinny Golia, Gino Robair, and Thomas Buckner.