George Lewis to Perform at The Kitchen, 2/9

To celebrate the release of the archival CD The Kitchen Improvises: 1976-1983 on Orange Mountain Music, composer George Lewis curates an evening of performances byThomas Buckner (voice), Earl Howard (saxophones and electronics), Oliver Lake (saxophones), Lewis (electronics, trombone), Michael Lytle (clarinets), Miya Masaoka (koto and electronics), Ikue Mori (electronics), Andrea Parkins (accordion, objects, electronics), and Lucie Vítková (accordion and voice), inspired by that flowering of hybridity on the downtown New York music scene. George Lewis: "The musicians on The Kitchen Improvises were part of a scene that became celebrated for its mobility, creating a new noise that spoke across boundaries of culture, genre, and practice. The artists at this concert, some of whom are on the CD, were chosen because they represent the very best of that original flowering of hybridity." The event takes place at The Kitchen on February 9.

Tickets are $15 and can be purchased online at www.thekitchen.org; by phone at 212.255.5793 x11; or in person at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street), Tuesdays - Saturdays, 2:00 -6:00 P.M. This performance has been organized by Lumi Tan.

On record, The Kitchen Improvises: 1976-1983 includes performances by Earl Howard, Gerry Hemingway, Roscoe Mitchell, Gerald Oshita, Thomas Buckner, Oliver Lake, Meltable Snaps It, and Lewis himself, who was additionally Music Curator at The Kitchen from 1980-1982. As Lewis writes in his liner notes: "The creative artists whose works appear on this CD of archivally preserved work forged heretofore uncommon aesthetic alliances in a practice of post-genre mobility that at the time seemed difficult to understand for those public commentators who were trapped in binary systems of cultural signification-jazz/classical, black/white, and the rest. What was being envisioned by the new improvisers was not a new common practice, but a new noise that could bring together the widest range of traditions. Improvisation provided a means of speaking across boundaries of culture, genre and practice, exposing the ideological rigidities that framed the practice as individualistic, habitual, uncontrolled, incoherent, lacking in formal unity, unreliable-and of course, simply 'unstructured.'"