The Red Microphone

John Pietaro: poetry, voice, percussion Ras Moshe Burnett: tenor saxophone, flute Rocco John Iacovone: alto saxophone Dave Ross, electric guitar Laurie Towers: fretless and fretted electric bass

The Red Microphone’s radical poetry and improvisational music draws on the fervent history of free jazz, Left culture, the Beat Generation and New York’s punk underground. The band’s saxophonists—Ras Moshe Burnett and Rocco John Iacovone—intertwine and off-set the pulsating lines of guitarist Dave Ross and bassist Laurie Towers, propelling center the spoken word of John Pietaro. The poetry and prose selections are works of Pietaro as well as masters Bertolt Brecht, Langston Hughes, Amiri and Amina Baraka, John Reed, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Diane Di Prima, Kenneth Fearing, Patti Smith, Walter Lowenfels and others.

The Red Microphone was founded as a quartet in 2010 to record “Brecht Breakdown” for the British label Institute for Alien Research’s album The Beat Sounds from Way Out. The piece, an amalgam of Brecht’s “Questions from a Worker Who Reads” and the ensemble’s free improvisation, was arranged by Pietaro as a unique brand of avant jazz threaded through 1920s-30s radical proletarian culture. Since that time, the band independently recorded The Red Microphone Speaks (2013) and has twice recorded for the legendary ESP-Disk label: 2017’s Amina Baraka & the Red Microphone, a critically-acclaimed collaboration with the noted poet/activist, and 2021’s And I Became of the Dark which added Dave Ross on guitar. The featured single, "Revenge of the Atom Spies", and the epic “When Reagan was Bad”, features a septet line-up inclusive of baritone saxophonist Claire Daly and violist Gwen Laster.

The Red Microphone’s music has been broadcast on the airwaves of WFMU-FM, NTS.live radio (Cologne, Germany), MakerParkRadio.NYC , and One Man’s Jazz podcast (Winnipeg, Canada). The ensemble has performed at events such as Left Forum, the International Human Rights Arts Festival, the Dissident Arts Festival, Make Music New York and The Eve of Eve Celebration of the Marxist Education Project, and at such spaces as Theatre 80, Riverside Church, the Brecht Forum, the Colony (Woodstock), El Taller Latino, 17 Frost Theatre, Mama Tried, Wayward Social, Lady Stardust and 5C, among others.

Bandcamp page: https://theredmicrophone.bandcamp.com/

Label page: http://www.espdisk.com/The%20Red%20Microphone

Spotify page: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2GrXIFVlTgNz2414jmuPJj

Spotify page (Amina Baraka & the Red Microphone): https://open.spotify.com/artist/68aEipBro9pOw2S9bG2P8l

Facebook page: https://m.facebook.com/TheRedMicrophone/

John Pietaro: [email protected] (646) 599-0060 http://JohnPietaro.com

Awards

ESP-Disk recording artist

Tags