Next Concert: Sunday May 8th 2pm, featuring the Daniel Kelly Trio

This Sunday!

2pm @ Douglass Street Music Collective
295 Douglass St. between 3rd and 4th Ave.
Brooklyn, NY
suggested donation $10





The Daniel Kelly Emerge Trio
Daniel Kelly - piano
Brian Ladd - bass
Jordan Perlson - drums



Award-winning composer and pianist, Daniel Kelly has developed a unique and personal approach to jazz, free improvisation and modern chamber music. Daniel has collaborated in performance and on disc with a wide range of artists, including Michael Brecker, Lauryn Hill, Ray Barretto, Don Byron, Bobby Sanabria, William Parker, John Zorn, David Murray, Donny McCaslin, David Binney, Brad Shepik, Joel Harrison, Nestor Torres, Briggan Krauss, Iva Bittova, Candido and many others. He performs regularly with bassist Harvie S and the genre-busting modern chamber ensemble the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Daniel has toured throughout the US, Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa and Central America. In addition to the several CDs he has recorded as sideman, he has recorded highly acclaimed CDs as a leader, including World and Duets with Ghosts which features Daniel’s unique approach to electronic sound manipulation and sampler. Daniel’s third CD Portal is an improvised solo piano suite that arose from his continuing series of improvised solo piano concerts. His quartet was the recipient of the 2007 Chamber Music America/ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award. His fourth CD, Emerge, will be released on Brooklyn Jazz Underground Records.

Daniel serves as the artistic director of the music based non-profit organization Connection Works. Along with founder, Rob Garcia and co-artistic director Michel Gentile, he has organized and helped present workshops for young people and an ongoing series of daylong concerts featuring artists such as Joe Lovano, Fly (with Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard), Dave Liebman, Adam Kolker Trio with John Abercrombie and Billy Hart, Dafnis Prieto Quartet, Yosvany Terry Quartet, Anat Cohen and Howard Alden, Wycliffe Gordon, Nikki Denner Septet with Dave Valentin, Adam Rudolph’s Go Organic Orchestra, Matt Darriau’s Yo Lateef and the Tony Malaby Trio.

Daniel has exhibited his commitment to arts education and young audiences by performing in schools and in artistic multi-media works for family audiences. His most notable collaborator is storyteller David Gonzalez. In addition to performing in hundreds of schools, they have toured to performing art centers throughout the US and Canada and the Royal National Theatre in London. They developed the multi-media theatrical work The Frog Bride, which premiered at the New Victory Theater on Broadway and incorporated Daniel’s music with the music of Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev and video images of paintings by Wassily Kandinsky. It was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in 2006. Daniel composed music for a new collaboration called Wounded Splendor, a multi-media work that is part of the University of Maryland’s “Performance as Politic/Artist as Activist” 2009 season bringing together music with video, poetry and monologues inspired from interviews with activists and experts in the environmental movement. David and Daniel have also been Lincoln Center Institute Repertory artists from 2002-05 and 2008-09.

Daniel was chosen by the US State Department to be a Jazz Ambassador, performing a six-week tour to India, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Vietnam and Bangladesh. This highly prestigious honor is only awarded to a few groups each year that travel to developing countries to perform concerts and workshops.

Daniel's talents as film composer can be heard in the films The Receipt, Suzana’s Dreams, Below the Belt (awarded Best Film of the Oregon Film Festival) and the feature film The Legend of Johnson Roebling.

Visit him at www.myspace.com/danielkellymusic and www.danielkellymusic.com.

P R E S S

“Daniel Kelly is a pianist and composer who confidently splits the difference between murky history and sleek progressivism” Nate Chinen, New York Times

"Pianist Daniel Kelly is original and adventurous."
-Howard Mandel, Author of Future Jazz and Miles, Coltrane & Cecil

Sadigursky / Hebert / Hirshfield @ Church for All Nations - August 21, 2010 - 417 W. 57th St.

Saturday August 21st - 8PM
417 W. 57th St.
NY, NY
$12 suggested donation

RIP Abbey Lincoln

I can't remember exactly how I found my way to Abbey Lincoln's music, but I know that she was the first living jazz singer to stop me in my tracks and make me want to hear a song again and again. I vaguely remember rummaging through the used CD bins at the local record store and seeing a record with Stan Getz (her 1991 release You Gotta Pay the Band, also with Hank Jones and Charlie Haden) and buying it based on Stan's presence... Regardless, I was hooked as soon as I heard the first notes of the song Bird Alone. Later on, I picked up other albums, including Abbey is Blue, which to this day is a desert island album for me.

The rawness and nakedness of her style and power of her conviction is almost unparalleled in the jazz tradition. She had nothing to prove about her voice or musicianship - it's simply there for us to take in, pure, honest, and timeless. Listening to her early records now, it's so hard to conceive that it's the voice of somebody in her twenties and thirties that is singing - it's so developed and full of feeling and sorrow.

Besides her singing, she had an exquisite choice of sidemen (just look at the roster of people on her Riverside albums of the fifties and sixties), unique taste in songs and and a totally adventurous approach to them. Although her own compositions were never my favorite things that she did, I do admire her desire to bring contemporary material to the jazz world that dealt with things other than romance, and I'm sure many of these songs will be sung by other singers for years to come.

I did see her perform once at Yoshi's in Oakland. She sounded great, and was just such a beautiful person to be in the presence of. She possessed a rare gentleness, style and grace that I will always remember. I only wish I had taken advantage of other opportunities to see her.

I put a few of my favorite songs of hers below. Read the New York Times obituary here.

Etudes II

I'm pleased to announce that my second book of clarinet etudes is now available at Amazon.com and www.Earspasm.com.

Bass clarinetist Michael Lowenstern will be recording the etudes over the next year or so in order to eventually sell them in PDF form at Earspasm. Right now you can purchase the hard copy of the book from his website.

This is what the critics are saying:

Sam Sadigursky's etudes are a significant and welcome addition to the clarinet study repertoire. These marvelous etudes combine traditional technical exercises with a contemporary flare and vocabulary. They are challenging for the serious clarinetist and are a wonderful tool to increase not only virtuosity but musicianship as well! I have started to use them with my students at Michigan State with much success! - Caroline Hartig, acclaimed soloist and recording artist


I love these etudes! They’re obsessive, concentrated, and right on point. They grip onto important musical and technical issues without ever letting go. They’re challenging, but the real challenge is mastering the musicality in them. If the familiar clarinet etudes are the meal, Sadigursky has just given us the espresso…. - Andrew Sterman, Phillip Glass Ensemble

Sam Sadigursky's characterful etudes are so well crafted and musically creative
that they make me want to practice them! My students at the University of
Delaware love them, and they target many problem areas in clarinet technique.
A great addition to the etude repertoire! - Marianne Gythfeldt, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Zephyros Winds

These etudes are essential for the advancing clarinetist. The greatest bore in an etude is laboring and solving a problem of technique without a satisfying musical result. . . Sam's etudes manage to reveal the wonderful possibilities in reaching new levels of ability. The pieces are harmonically compelling, lyrical, and often witty. Concise but never narrowly conceived... This one's staying on the stand; I can't recommend it highly enough. - Peter Hess, Balkan Beat Box, Slavic Soul Party

Clarinetists will delight in these charming, graceful études, filled
with unexpected harmonic twists and turns. - Derek Bermel, clarinetist/composer/conductor

Review by Martin Gladu

Read it at All About Jazz.

There is something of genius in Sam Sadigursky's musical poeticizing. Indeed, besides his knack for casting the most uncanny yet perfect voices for his eclectic and at times Kafka-esque sets, the Brooklyn-based reedman/composer is rapidly becoming the beacon of modern jazz-informed musical prosody. In this capacity, he replenishes the dormant format with a daring, integrated approach to composition, cadence and arranging, while remaining creatively respectful towards the texts he sets to music. As unsettling as some of his arrangements may be, he always finds imaginative ways to put his writers' verses in an enhancive, albeit at times wry, light.

Though the second installment of his ongoing Words Project, Words Project II (New Amsterdam, 2008), proved somewhat disappointing, Sadigursky returns with a batch of incantations as gripping as the project's acclaimed first effort, Words Project (New Amsterdam, 2007). While this first outing firmly established him as a commendable talent right out of the gate, with Miniatures he reaches a new level of formal mastery, using the contrapuntal aspect of his compositional trade more fruitfully and somewhat more prominently.

On the opening "Content," Sadigursky's treatment of David Ignatow's thought-phrase gets a mechanistic, clock-like working, as each of its syntactical propositions get isolated and repeated ad infinitum by Monika Heidelmann's overdubbed vocals, but with each line's exposition deployed through its own set of rhythmic permutations. In both its design and effect, it is reminiscent of the medieval motet. Fernando Pessoa's "Recall" takes a similarly clever, though more fugal spin. Other pieces in the program also showcase Sadigursky's sure skill as an arranger/orchestrator, namely the tranquil wind arrangement of "Wistful," the string quartet-adorned "Now," and the monosyllabic chorale "Do Me That Love."

But the real ear-opening moment comes in Christine Correa's performance of Maxim Gorky's scornful screed against jazz, "O Muzike Tolstykh." The assembling of the overly expressive vocalist—who takes a serious joy digging in each of the Bolshevik author's cutting descriptions—and Sadigursky's cohorts' dissonant machinations lends to one memorable moment. The sonorous commentary is followed by the group's dense construct around Alena Syknkova's "Tears," akin to listening to Björk in the middle of a noisy New York City traffic jam. Conversely, Maureen MacLane's "Ode" gently rolls off the tongue of violinist Roland Satterwhite's soft, rickety voice, which is stealthily supported by Michael Beers' English horn and the leader on piano. "To Know Silence Perfectly," a dreamy, almost psychedelic ditty, also adds to the other, more introspective vignettes.

Miniatures is an engaging, richly textured work to be reckoned with, a modern masterpiece of the profoundest authenticity.

for your podcasting pleasure

Jason Crane just posted a nice interview we did last month. Go to The Jazz Session to listen to it, or look for it on iTunes.

Etude Videos

Marianne Gythfeldt, who I was fortunate to take clarinet lessons with in college, recently recorded two of my clarinet etudes. Here are some videos of them that I've posted on YouTube.

You can purchase the etudes here.