A native of California, Steven Bernstein (b. 1961, USA) moved to New York on the late seventies of the past century, where he began his musical career after a period of studies in the reputed university of Berkeley. His first moment of visibility and recognition came when he joined John Lurie’s seminal post-jazz band, Lounge Lizards. In 1996, the trumpeter founds his own band, the Sexmob, alongside saxophonist Briggan Krauss, bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen, a project which is today considered one of the precursors of a frontier-expanding movement of jazz to more experimental territories and to the most extreme and marginal expressions of rock. Bernstein has also collaborated in the recordings of four albums from the series Radical Jewish Culture of John Zorn, and, besides the punctual collaborations with other musicians, he also worked as arranger for artists and composers such as Lou Reed, Bill Frisell or dub luminary Lee Scratch Perry.

Catherine Russell (b. 1956, USA) is one of today’s most original jazz and blues vocalists, with a solid career, both under her own name as well as in collaboration with some of the most prominent composers and arrangers of contemporary music, that transcend jazz’s frontiers. Her versatility and intuitive and emotional approach to music are the reasons why Catherine Russell is currently considered one of the greatest interpreters of the American songbook, and explain why she has worked with several important artists of our time, such as David Bowie, Paul Simon and Wynton Marsalis.

The collaboration between Steven Bernstein and Catherine Russell will be supported by Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra, a big band formed by a group of extraordinary musicians (such as trumpeter Curtis Fowlkes and guitarist Doug Wieselman, among others). Focused on a purpose of reinterpretation and transfiguration of the music of the twentieth century, the music of this orchestra is abundantly improvised and of a wide stylistic latitude, using the creative formulas invented in several fields of popular music in order to create new interpretations, adapted to an hypertextual modernity in which references are constantly being intersected by other references. Yet, what comes out of this idea is not even close to an analytic or cerebral music, since the presence of Catherine Russell, in an unprecedented collaboration with Bernstein and the Millennial Territory Band, confers an aural and timeless dimension to this project, qualities which are absolutely decisive in the art of the third millennium.