TURNmusic featuring DBR

About

TURNmusic returns to live performance by giving focus to musicians, composers, and stories that demand our attention. Anne Decker, the experimental chamber collective’s founder and director, charted two distinct paths in search of convergence. In the first, TURNmusic explores the entwined history of Native American and African cultures in post-colonial America, drawing on selections from storyteller/composer Valerie Coleman’s Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes. This is contrasted against a second path: the fusion of chamber music, funk, and blues. TURNmusic takes on Trevor Weston’s Dig It, an homage to the insurrectionist dance music that soundtracked his youth—particularly fellow New Jersey natives like Parliament Funkadelic and the Jimmy Castor Bunch. TURNmusic’s Mary Rowell opens the program with American composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Blue/s Form.

Inspired by this brew of American traditions, funk, collaboration, compassion, and revolution, the ever-restless TURNmusic perform these new arrangements alongside Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR). Dating back to his celebrated Voodoo Violin Concerto, and continuing through his recent 24-Hour Protest Song, DBR has fused his refined classical background with earthy abstractions and the courser textures of jazz, funk, and hip-hop throughout his career.

TURNmusic’s record of celebrating the incredible work of local musicians and music creators makes them natural collaborators with the likeminded DBR. For this show, DBR grounds TURNmusic’s centuries-spanning set in the present, finding resonance in the issues and styles of the here and now.

Program:

• Blue/s Form - I. Plain Blue/s II. Just Blue/s III. Jettin’ - Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson
• Dig It - Trevor Weston
• Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes - Valerie Coleman
• Fast BLACK Dance Machine - Daniel Bernard Roumain
• Voodoo Violin Concerto No. 1 (Daniel Bernard Roumain, violin) - Daniel Bernard Roumain