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Eric Hofbauer Quintet

Prehistoric Jazz is a concert program and sister recordings (volumes 1 and 2) which features Hofbauer’s jazz quintet arrangements of both Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Messiaen’s Quartet For The End Of Time.

The program title was inspired by video footage of Leonard Bernstein rehearsing The Rite of Spring in 1987 where he instructs the timpanist to play his part like “prehistoric jazz.” Hofbauer’s quintet arrangements synthesize the most memorable melodic and rhythmic elements from the original scores with jazz improvisation.

Stravinsky revolutionized the music world in 1913 with his use of extreme dissonance and shocking rhythmic energy. Around the same time, Jazz started to introduce itself and its own shocking rhythmic language to American audiences. Later in the early 1940’s, as Messiaen continued Stravinksy’s dissonant polytonal explorations, Bebop was redefining the harmonic vocabulary of modern jazz in similar directions. Hofbauer’s arrangements take the masterworks off their 20th century pedestals and deconstruct them as vehicles for ensemble dialogue and personal expression. This method of reinterpretation has been a part of the jazz tradition from its inception through the work of Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and even Gunther Schuller’s Third Stream movement.

The quintet features Eric Hofbauer on guitar, Todd Brunel on clarinet and bass clarinet, Jerry Sabatini on trumpet, Junko Fujiwara on cello and Curt Newton on drum set. All of the musicians are accomplished jazz and new music improvisers who also perform in classical and modern music settings.

Prehistoric Jazz is a concert program tailored for the collegiate community or any arts and culture education-based audience. This concert presentation will complement college or high school course work in aesthetics, music history, jazz studies, post-modernism, or 20th century cultural studies. The ensemble is available for additional workshops and talk-backs with the audience that can be included as part of the presentation of the work.

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“The studied primitivism of Igor Stravinsky’s symphonic The Rite of Spring is miniaturized with each player standing in for a different orchestral section. The result is as rousing and romantic as the original score, but with openings for distinctive solos that rhythmically extend the composer’s ur-modernism. Originally composed for a chamber ensemble, Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps is implemented with as much joyous ecstasy as the composer intended, but stripped of its overt Christian mysticism. – Ken Waxman, The Whole Note

“Stravinsky’s music is deconstructed and personalized into a jazz framework as the quintet transform “Ritual of Abduction” and “Ritual of The Two Rival Tribes” into swinging outlandish affairs while evoking a sense of both calm and cacophony to the invigorating “Spring Rounds.” There are memorable individual performances such as Newton’s crisp and lively percussion in “Dancing Out of The Earth” and Fujiwara’s warm cello reverberations in “The Exalted Sacrifice.” Hofbauer offers a glowing solo in “The Naming and Honoring of The Chosen One” with sheer dexterity and inventiveness and Sabatini brings sensitivity and layered contours through his trumpet-mute in “Evocation of The Ancestors.” Numerous tempo changes, twists and turns, and plenty of dramatics, the release is a testament to both Stravinsky’s genius and Hofbauer’s lucid vision. The recording concludes with as much personality and vim as it began—the eccentrics of “Ritual Action of The Ancestors” with its swing-march turned to groove and “Sacrificial Dance”‘s free jazz blowout. – Mark F. Turner, All About Jazz

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Prehistoric Jazz...

Creative Nation Music
2014

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Prehistoric Jazz...

Creative Nation Music
2014

buy

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