Sat 2/25 @ 7-9PM
New York-based Gregg August is a bassist player and composer who works across genre boundaries in classical, jazz, avant-garde and Latin music. He performs with orchestra and jazz ensembles and has his own record label to release his own music. In 2020, it put out Dialogues on Race in which he used poetry by writers such as Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou to address race relations in the U.S.
His newest work is called “Recitations and Dedications,” and it will be premiered this week by CityMusic Cleveland at their concert taking place at Praxis Fiber Workshop’s gallery in the Waterloo Arts District. In it, he continues his interest in exploring the history of racism in the U.S., with poems incorporated into two of the movements that look at deportation of Chinese workers through the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the response Emmett Till’s mother Mamie Till Mobley to his lynching murder in 1955.
The concert, titled “Explorations for Clarinet, Strings & Piano,” will also feature Amanda Harberg’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, Keni Bunch’s Drift: An Eventual Lullaby, and Jim Stephenson’s Last Chants. All are contemporary, currently working composers.
Musicians include clarinetist Daniel Gilbert, violinists Sibbi Bernhardson and Kiarra Saito-Beckmann, violist Yaël Senamaud-Cohen, cellist Anna Bowman, bassist Tracy Rowell and pianist Donna Lee.
Learn more about August’s music and the upcoming concert on this YouTube video.
citymusiccleveland.org/current-season/explorations