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Dana Reason

Dana Reason is a composer, improviser, keyboardist, conceptual artist, producer, and researcher, with a Ph.D. in Critical Studies and Experimental Practices from the University of California, San Diego. Her focus is on performance, improvisation, composition, scoring, and research in new and emergent musical fields.

As a performing artist working at the intersections of twentieth and twenty-first-century musical genres and intermedia practices, she moves easily between genres encompassing a dynamic stylistic range and repertoire. 

She has been featured on more than 17 commercially released recordings, including as a member of The Space Between Trio with American electronic arts pioneer Pauline Oliveros.

As a film composer, performer, and arranger, Reason has created music for a variety of genres, including film, theatre, games, and large and small ensembles.

She created the original film score for: Back to God’s Country (1919) featuring Nell Shipman for Kino Lorber Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers.

Her piece Folded Subjects: Olive Rose premiered at McGill University in 2017. Her sound-art sculpture, UnHeard, premiered at CEI Artworks in 2016.

Her conceptual, social, and political work: Tea & Fences: A Quiet Tea Party (2017) premiered at the Santa Monica library as part of a new collection of works: Propositional Attitudes (Golden Spike Press, 2018), edited by performance and visual artists: John Burtle and Elana Mann. Tea and Fences was also performed on the Heart of a Forest tour in 2016 by Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and appears on additional soundtracks, including, Within Our Gates and Body, Soul on Pioneers of African-American Cinema (Kino-2016) and the PBS documentary soundtrack – Birth of a Movement (2017). Birth of a Movement was nominated for an Emmy in 2018.

In addition, for work with Paul Miller, Reason was credited as an arranger for the PBS Documentary series: Reconstruction: America After the Civil War by Dr. Henry Louis Gates (2019).

Dana Reason currently lives in Oregon, USA, where she holds the position of Assistant Professor of Contemporary Music, School of Arts and Communication, at Oregon State University.


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Album Review

Roscoe Mitchell with Ostravska Banda: Distant Radio Transmission

Read "Distant Radio Transmission" reviewed by Alberto Bazzurro


Decisamente prolifico, in anni recenti, Roscoe Mitchell, e non ce ne rallegreremo mai abbastanza. Certo, con lui c'è sempre il rischio del prodotto non perfettamente a fuoco, centrato, in poche parole all'altezza del suo grande talento (e ormai, varcata la soglia degli ottanta, acclarato magistero, e da un po'), ma per fortuna non è questo il caso: in questo lavoro con la Ostravska Banda così felicemente articolato è in qualche modo raccolto, quintessenziato, il succo del suo sapere (e ardire) ...

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Album Review

Roscoe Mitchell with Ostravska Banda: Distant Radio Transmission

Read "Distant Radio Transmission" reviewed by Mark Corroto


Sometimes music makes you want to become a better dancer, or maybe even a better lover. With Roscoe Mitchell's music, you can't help but aspire to be a better listener. The co-founder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians creates sounds that transcend jazz, new classical, and avant-garde musics. With Distant Radio Transmission he presents music that he previously recorded (solo or in small improvising groups) and reworked for a 33-piece orchestra, ...

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Album Review

Roscoe Mitchell with Ostravska Banda: Distant Radio Transmission

Read "Distant Radio Transmission" reviewed by Karl Ackermann


Roscoe Mitchell, a co-founder of the AACM and Art Ensemble of Chicago, continues to discover new intersections of jazz, classical and avant-garde music with Distant Radio Transmission. As he approaches eighty years of age Mitchell has waved off time and tradition, reinventing the AEoC brand with the orchestrated--sometimes operatic--We Are on the Edge: A 50th Anniversary Celebration (Pi Recordings, 2019), a project that bore little resemblance to the group's historical discography. On this album, he draws on past compositions to ...

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Live Review

Dana Reason Trio: Bellingham, Washington July 24, 2010

Read "Dana Reason Trio: Bellingham, Washington July 24, 2010" reviewed by Michael Boyce


Dana Reason TrioThe Amadeus ProjectBellingham, WashingtonJuly 24, 2010 The Dana Reason Trio's recent Angle of Vision Tour performance in Bellingham, Washington consisted mostly of new material, which they were preparing to record a couple of days later at Wild Rose Artists' Studio in Oregon. Dana Reason has an accomplished background as both a classical and avant-garde composer and pianist, working and recording with such musicians as Cecil Taylor, Pauline Oliveros, George E. ...

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Distant Radio...

Wide Hive Records
2020

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Revealed

Circumvention Music
2010

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Revealed

Circumvention Music
2009

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