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CD |
| 4.060 Ft
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| 1. | Cloud Call
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| 2. | From East Sixth Street
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| 3. | Walking Pictures
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| 4. | Third Sight
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| 5. | Embers
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Jazz
Jason Kao Hwang's quartet EDGE is nested in the urban mountains of New York City where he created Stories Before Within, personal tales celebrating both life and loss. Over the past three years EDGE has embraced both past and future with musical offerings resonant with human and animal overtones. Their instruments sing through sharp lines vibrating between history, cultures and genres.
Cloud Call was composed in 1984, inspired by a Ukrainian street festival in NYC's East Village. New airborne rhythms and revolutions send this celebratory call aloft.
From East Sixth Street is where I lived in Manhattan for eight years in a tiny, $100/month apartment. Same block where Lee Morgan had lived, not far from Charlie Parker's former home, the East Village is a historic musical neighborhood. In this composition, the energy of that past surges into the present, breaking shackles of negativity to affirm our lives.
Walking Pictures emerge after meditation, like a parade of cherished rascals from one's life that speak of essence and kindle all shades of emotions.
Third Sight, a melody influenced by Korean music, was originally recorded by Local Lingo (Euonymus), my duets with ajeng musician Sang Won Park. For EDGE, the arrangement is a prismatic ritual, where the dialogue of spirits leads us to what is unspoken, unknown and unnamed.
Embers are seen and felt in the isolation that we sometimes need to see and move forward from.
In 2006, EDGE's first CD (Asian Improv Records) scaled the college radio charts at #14 for CMJ and #4 for Canada's EARSHOT. EDGE was ranked #3 on a Top Ten CDs of 2006 list for ALL ABOUT JAZZ. They have performed at the Vision Festival XI, Tonic, Brooklyn College, the Living Theater, and the Stone, all in NYC. EDGE also performed at Sangha (Washington, D.C.), An die Musik (Baltimore), the Deep Listening Institute (Kingston, NY), and the Sanctuary for Independent Media (Troy, NY).
In the fall of 2008, EDGE will tour Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo. They will also perform in EDGEFEST (name has no prior relation) at the Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Jason Kao Hwang (composer, violin, viola) has created works ranging from jazz, classical, "new" and world music. As violinist, he has worked with Reggie Workman, William Parker, Pheeroan akLaff, Anthony Braxton, Vladamir Tarasov, Butch Morris and Henry Threadgill. As composer he has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and New Jersey State Council on the Arts and others. His duo with Sang Won Park(kayagum, ajeng, voice), Local Lingo (Euonymus Records), recently broke into the CMJ charts at #36. His chamber opera, The Floating Box, A Story in Chinatown (New World Records), was named one of the top ten opera recordings of 2005 by Opera News. Music From China recently commissioned his string quartet, In the Garden of Morning Glories (violin, erhu, pipa, yanqin), which premiered at Symphony Space.
Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet) is a composer and bandleader born in 1975, raised in Boston, and presently residing in Brooklyn. Bynum has established a reputation as a unique musical voice willing to take chances in a wide variety of artistic contexts. Projects range from ensembles in the jazz tradition, to work with DJs, contemporary classical composers, and world music ensembles, to composing for film and theater, to collaborations with dancers and visual artists. He leads a variety of small groups and the large ensemble SpiderMonkey Strings, and works with Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, and the Fully Celebrated Orchestra.
Andrew Drury (drum set) is a drummer/composer whose work has been noted for its lyricism and expansive approach to form and technique. Drury can be heard on fifteen CDs (two as a bandleader) and he has performed in Europe and the Americas with Michel Doneda, Mark Dresser, Briggan Krauss, Myra Melford, Chris Speed, Jack Wright, Kenny Wolleson's Marching Band with Butch Morris, and others. A former student of Ed Blackwell, he photographs drum solos in desert and prairie settings, collaborates frequently with dancers, and has led over 700 junk percussion workshops across the U.S.
Ken Filiano (string bass), has fused the rich traditions of the double bass, bringing out the many voices inherent to the instrument. His solo bass CD, Subvenire (NineWinds), received unanimous critical praise, and was chosen by Cadence Magazine as one of the top ten CDs of 2003. Ken tours widely, performing at the DuMaurier International Jazz Festival, Banlieues Bleues Festival (Paris, France); and on many concert stages including Carnegie Hall. He was principal bassist with the Cascade Festival Orchestra from 1985 - 2002. Ken has also played and/or recorded with artists and orchestras including Bobby Bradford, Nels Cline, Vinnie Golia, Dom Minasi, Alex Cline, Ted Dunbar, and Joseph Jarman.
The music of violinist Jason Kao Hwang and the quartet Edge on their second CD is so intangibly inviting and elusive that to describe it with mere words might be folly. Empowered by a balanced combination of composition, improvisation, and telepathy, not to mention an infinite amount of elements, this recording must be heard in its own context and stance. First off, the personnel of bassist Ken Filiano, drummer Andrew Drury and cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum are truly outstanding individuals who wholly come together under Hwang's spellbinding storytelling concept. Highly developed chapters, volumes, and theses tumble out with no seeming end. Each of the five tracks hold great intrigue, starting with the mercurial "Cloud Call," with Hwang's sonic violin and Drury's lithe drumming setting the tone. It's truly a tour de force epic, involved and interactive, then dour and introspective, connected in its deconstruct; animated and direct in a 6/8 passage with constant freedom changes as the key. The 14-minute "Embers" smolders coolly under Filiano's flowing bowing and Drury's inventive cymbal techniques, with startling spatial harmonics, romantic balladic hints, intersecting lines crossing unabated, and echoes of pure emotion ending in melancholy. "Walking Pictures" is the third lengthy discourse, with Hwang on the viola in a bluesy, Leroy Jenkins inspired mood, dramatic and brittle, ready to burst with tension and release devices, but no dynamic constraints. There's freedom in the groove of "From East Sixth Street," with conversational themes and dialogue in many languages of interrelated spheres of thought and dark passages. The most unique track may be "Third Sight," a life cycle piece, starting as an Asian waltz, tuneful and hip, lighthearted and infused with a country-style motif driven to hard paced solos especially by Hwang and the always wonderful Bynum, fitting beautifully as if sexual before resting, dreaming, waking, and then returning to the quick-paced rat race. This in many ways is a remarkable statement of modern 21st century music, done by a group that you need to hear in live performance, after you've purchased this incredible recording.
---Michael G. Nastos, All Music Guide
Jason Kao Hwang
Active Decades: '80s, '90s and '00s
Genre: Jazz
Styles: Modern Creative, World Fusion
Violinist/violist Jason Kao Hwang is involved in creative improvised contemporary music based on jazz, classical, and world music elements. He was born in New York City in 1957, not formally trained in traditional Asian music as an American born citizen of Chinese descent, but he has listened to it extensively. In the '70s he was part of the New York loft scene, a think tank for progressive innovators and improvisers. A member of the writer's wing of the Basement Workshop, an historic Asian-American arts conclave in New York City's Chinatown. Some of the musicians to spring from this collective were Gerald Oshita, Fred Houn, Miya Masaoka, Frances Wong, Jon Jang and Mark Izu. Hwang was inspired by the creative improvisers of the day - Henry Threadgill, Borah Bergman, Butch Morris, Reggie Workman and Ken McIntyre. Hwang became known initially for fronting the Far East Side Band from 1990-2004, featuring Sang-Won Park, Joe Dailey, Satoshi Takeishi and Yukio Tsuji, combining exotic instruments such as the taiko, kayagum, tuba and his violin, issuing two CD's on the Victo and New World labels, and touring worldwide, including Beijing, China. He performed and co-arranged music for the original stage production of the Tony award winning "M Butterfly." Hwang also led a trio, documenting music for the Sound Aspects and Flying Panda labels. His scores were commissioned by the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, a composition "Flight of Whispers" was underwritten and performed as Music For Homemade Instruments for CRI records on a compilation recording of Chinese-American composers, and he wrote the chamber opera "The Floating Box: A Story In Chinatown." He has received numerous grants from Meet The Composer, the National Endowment For The Arts, New York State Council Of The Arts, New Jersey State Council Of The Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Greenwall and Puffin Foundations, the American Music Center, and the Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions. In his role as an educator, Hwang has taught at several grade levels including founding adult classes in Asian American Music at New York University, and lecturing at Westminster and Brooklyn Colleges. High school students at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas benefited in his instruction of music, oral histories and poems from 2002 through 2005, and he conducted workshops with Young Audiences/New York for elementary school students and teachers in composition and improvised music. As an accompanist, Hwang has worked with Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Ken McIntyre, Butch Morris, Reggie Workman, Vladmir Tarasov, Tatsu Aoki, William Parker, Sirone, William Hooker and Pheeroan AkLaff. His group Edge is a collective ensemble featuring Andrew Drury, Taylor Ho Bynum and Ken Filiano, and they have recorded for the Asian Improv and Innova labels.
---Michael G. Nastos, All Music Guide |
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