Paul Steinbeck at City Lights (Virtual Event)

Paul Steinbeck in conversation with Richard Scheinin celebrates the publication of Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM, a groundbreaking study of the trailblazing music of Chicago’s AACM, a leader in the world of jazz and experimental music.

 

Founded on Chicago’s South Side in 1965 and still thriving today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is the most influential collective organization in jazz and experimental music. In Sound Experiments, Paul Steinbeck offers an in-depth historical and musical investigation of the collective, analyzing individual performances and formal innovations in captivating detail. He pays particular attention to compositions by Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell, the Association’s leading figures, as well as Anthony Braxton, George Lewis (and his famous computer-music experiment, Voyager), Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry Threadgill, along with younger AACM members such as Mike Reed, Tomeka Reid, and Nicole Mitchell.

 

Sound Experiments represents a sonic history, spanning six decades, that affords insight not only into the individuals who created this music but also into an astonishing collective aesthetic. This aesthetic was uniquely grounded in nurturing communal ties across generations, as well as a commitment to experimentalism. The AACM’s compositions broke down the barriers between jazz and experimental music and made essential contributions to African American expression more broadly. Steinbeck shows how the creators of these extraordinary pieces pioneered novel approaches to instrumentation, notation, conducting, musical form, and technology, creating new soundscapes in contemporary music.

 

Register here for this free event.

Conversation & Book Event: ‘Pow! Right in the Eye!’ with Lynn Gumpert and Madeline Warren

Hauser & Wirth Southampton is pleased to host a special book event celebrating the recently released memoir Pow! Right in the Eye!  by provocative Parisian art dealer Berthe Weill, now available in English for the first time.  

 

The event will feature a conversation between the book’s editor and director of NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, Lynn Gumpert, and Senior Director at Hauser & Wirth Southampton, Madeline Warren. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during the event.

 

This event is free, however, reservations and proof of vaccination are required.  

 

Click here to register.

 

About Berthe Weill and Pow! Right in the Eye!
Berthe Weill (1865–1951) was a formidable Parisian dealer born into a Jewish family of very modest means. One of the first female gallerists in the business, she first opened the Galerie B. Weill in the heart of Paris’s art gallery district in 1901, holding innumerable exhibitions over nearly forty years. Written out of art history for decades, Weill has only recently regained the recognition she deserves. Under five feet tall and bespectacled, Weill was beloved by the artists she supported, and, by the time of her death in 1951, Weill had promoted more than three hundred artists—including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, and Suzanne Valadon—many of whom were women and nearly all young and unknown when she first exhibited them.

 

Pow! Right in the Eye! makes Weill’s provocative 1933 memoir available to English readers for the first time, offering rare insights into the Parisian avant-garde and a lively inside account of the development of the modern art market.

 

About Lynn Gumpert
Lynn Gumpert is director of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. She is coeditor of Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s.

Terms of Exchange: Brazilian Intellectuals and the French Social Sciences

Would the most recognizable ideas in the French social sciences have developed without the influence of Brazilian intellectuals? While any study of Brazilian social sciences acknowledges the influence of French scholars, Ian Merkel, Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, argues the reverse is also true: the French social sciences were profoundly marked by Brazilian thought, particularly through the University of São Paulo. Using the idea of the “cluster,” Merkel traces the intertwined networks of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel, Roger Bastide, and Pierre Monbeig as they overlapped at USP and engaged with Brazilian scholars such as Mário de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, and Caio Prado Jr. Through his collective intellectual biography of Brazilian and French social sciences, Ian Merkel reveals connections that shed new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy, even as it prompts us to revisit established thinking on the process of knowledge formation through fieldwork and intellectual exchange.

To register for the free online event, click here.

Paul Steinbeck Presents Sound Experiments with George E. Lewis at Rizzoli

Paul Steinbeck presents Sound Experiments, a groundbreaking study of the trailblazing music of Chicago’s AACM, a leader in the world of jazz and experimental music.

 

PLEASE REGISTER HERE

 

Guests over the age of five must wear masks and show proof of vaccination (either a vaccine card or an Excelsior Pass).

Jessa Crisipin at Kansas City Book Festival

Details to come.

Paul Steinbeck at Hyde Park Jazz Festival

Paul Steinbeck, author of Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM, will be joined by the current AACM President, Adam Zanolini.

 

Paul Steinbeck is an associate professor of music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written extensively about the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Fred Anderson. Steinbeck’s book Sound Experiments is a study of ten influential pieces by AACM composers. His previous book Message to Our Folks, a history of the Art Ensemble, is available in English from the University of Chicago Press, in Italian from Edizioni Quodlibet, and in French from the Presses Universitaires du Midi. With Fred Anderson, Steinbeck is co-author of Exercises for the Creative Musician, a method book for improvisers.

 

Steinbeck is also a bassist, composer, and improviser. He studied bass with Harrison Bankhead and composition with Ari Brown. His compositions and improvisations are documented on nineteen recordings. He performs with a number of ensembles, including Low End Theory, co-led with former AACM president Mwata Bowden.

 

For more information regarding this event, click here.

Emily Ogden at New Dominion Bookshop

An in-person conversation about On Not Knowing between its author Emily Ogden and the poet Brian Teare.