JACK Quartet / Matthew Evan Taylor

About

JACK Quartet will be giving the world premiere of Wadada Leo Smith’s String Quartet No. 13 (with soprano voice), plus performing two works with and by Matthew Evan Taylor.

Hailed by the New York Times as “our leading new-music foursome,” the JACK Quartet is one of the most acclaimed, renowned, and respected groups performing today. JACK has maintained an unwavering commitment to their mission of performing and commissioning new works, giving voice to underheard composers, and cultivating an ever-greater sense of openness toward contemporary classical music.

Through intimate relationships with today’s most creative voices, JACK embraces close collaboration with the composers they perform, leading to a radical embodiment of the technical, musical, and emotional aspects of their work. The quartet has worked with artists such as Julia Wolfe, George Lewis, Chaya Czernowin, Helmut Lachenmann, Caroline Shaw, and Simon Steen-Andersen, with upcoming and recent premieres including works by Tyshawn Sorey, Sabrina Schroeder, John Luther Adams, Clara Iannotta, Philip Glass, Catherine Lamb, Lester St. Louis, and John Zorn. Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and appreciation of new string quartet music.

Composer and saxophonist Matthew Evan Taylor has been hailed as “a promising new voice” (Miami Herald) and a “risk taker” (Huffington Post) whose music is “insistent and defiant . . . envelopingly hypnotic” (Lucid Culture). A southern kid who worshiped at the altar of Cannonball Adderley, Ornette Coleman, Carla Bley, and Charles Mingus, Matthew’s music has been performed across the United States and Europe by such ensembles as the Cleveland Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony, the Metropolis Ensemble, the Imani Winds, and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. As a performer, Matthew has worked with musicians Elliott Sharp, Marilyn Crispell, Tatsuya Nakatani, Taylor Ho Bynum, Mary Halvorson; visual artists Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and Dannielle Tegeder; and dancers Katherine Kramer, Sara Shelton, Laurel Jenkins, and Lida Winfield.

Matthew is Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College in Vermont.