This event is part of a full month of New York performances by Bynum, including a March residency at Brooklyn's Tea Lounge with his genre-defying big band, Positive Catastrophe, and a quartet performance at the Rhythm in the Kitchen Festival on March 29th.
Madeleine Dreams is inspired by the novel Madeleine is Sleeping (Harcourt), a 2004 National Book Award finalist written by his sister, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum. The piece draws text from the book, which “alternates deftly between reality and illusion as it follows Madeleine down a path of sexual, artistic and personal discovery" (Publisher's Weekly), and further explores its theme of “the logic of dreams," a recurring thread in Bynum's work as a composer.
The music was written specifically for Kitamura and SpiderMonkey Strings, an unusual combination of brass, strings and drums featuring Joseph Daley, Jason Kao Hwang, Jessica Pavone, Tomas Ulrich, Pete Fitzpatrick and Luther Gray. The group, which earned widespread critical attention for its 2005 debut, Other Stories [Three Suites] (482 Music), will also perform Madeleine Dreams in Belgium and The Netherlands in early April.
“Cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum is at the forefront of a younger generation of creative musicians in New York," writes AllAboutJazz.com's John Sharpe. “He combines thrilling improvisation with stealthy composition, unconfined by genre."
Other critics agree, calling him “one of the most exciting figures in jazz's new power generation" (Steve Dollar, Time Out Chicago), “a strong cornetist and serious- minded composer with experimental tendencies" (Nate Chinen, New York Times) and “an agile and creative improviser who sounds like no one but himself" (Chris Kelsey, JazzTimes). Jazzwise reviewer Kevin Le Gendre adds, “Bynum is thinking outside of the jazz box without getting trapped inside another in the process."
Bynum's expansive resume includes a wide variety of work with contemporaries and legendary figures alike, most notably the iconic saxophonist/composer Anthony Braxton, with whom he has performed and recorded extensively over the past decade. His most recent releases as a leader are The Middle Picture (Firehouse 12, 2007), featuring his trio/sextet, and True Events (482 Music, 2007), a recording of cornet/percussion duets with Fujiwara that veteran New York jazz writers Howard Mandel and K. Leander Williams, among others, included on their top 10 lists for the year.
In addition to leading his own bands, Bynum is a member of such groups as Jason Kao Hwang's Edge and the large ensembles of Bill Dixon and Cecil Taylor, among many others. He is also a curator for the annual Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT) in New York.
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