Evento
SUNDAY 14 NOVEMBER, 16H00
Big
Band da ESMAE dirigida por Ryan Cohan
Ryan Cohan direção
Big Band da
ESMAE
Entrada
gratuita, até ao
limite da lotação da sala
Although, as it is
widely known, jazz is primarily a black musical form rooted in African sound
expressions and its equivalents transplanted to the United States of America,
throughout the course of time, however, the organic principles of this genre
were incorporated by classical tradition and intellectualized accordingly to
western’s patterns. Therefore, while jazz was maturing its identity and
expanding its rays of influence, assimilating and reinterpreting other musical
traditions, it was only natural the appearance of musicians such as Gil Evans,
in collaboration with Miles Davis, or more recently, Uri Caine, who began to
claim the existence of a line of continuity between classical western music and
jazz, and therefore harmonizing in the same musical cosmology composers
apparently as alien to one another such as Schoenberg and Charlie Parker, Duke
Ellington and Bach.
A Chicago native, pianist and composer Ryan Cohan is,
more than twenty years since he first began his career in music, a
distinguished representative of one of jazz’s most prominent tendencies in the
twentieth-first century, mainly focused on the exploration of jazz through the
prism of its associations not only with classical music but also with the music
from non-Western cultures and geographies. A graduate of DePaul University, the
outset of his musical path takes place in the middle-1990’s when he recorded
his first solo album, “Real World”, and began to gain notoriety due to his
compositions and arrangements for multiple Ramsey Lewis’
albums and writing the theme music for his TV show "The Legends of
Jazz". While collaborating with world-renowned jazz ensembles and
musicians such as The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Freddie Hubbard, Curtis
Fuller, Joe Locke or Kurt Elling, among many others, Ryan Cohan has
been building over the years an expansive body of work in several formats and
configurations, including piano solo pieces, orchestral arrangements and scores
for independent films. Cohan, a Guggenheim Fellow in
music composition, has released six albums of original work to this
date, the last of which, “Originations” (2020), is a six-movement suite written
for jazz sextet and string quartet that juxtaposes Jewish and Arabic musical
languages, blending them with classical compositional elements and
improvisation.
In Guimarães Jazz’s 2021 edition, Ryan Cohan will perform
with his quintet and will be also responsible for the festival’s partnership
with ESMAE. As always since the beginning of the project, the North-American
pianist and composer will direct this school’s big band, therefore carrying out
the educative and formative role that we believe to be part of Guimarães Jazz’s
mission.