In Support Of Critically-Acclaimed Recording Blue Mongol On Sunnyside Records
Brooklyn, NY - All good things in all good time. Over a year in the making, the legendary trombonist Roswell Rudd has finally announced a long-awaited string of performances with Badma Khanda's Mongolian Buryat Band. The tour will include concerts in nine US cities. The unique collaboration of Rudd and Khanda's Buryat Band first came to fruition with the release of the critically-acclaimed album entitled Blue Mongol in 2005 on Sunnyside Records. Much like this studio recording, in the “live" setting, Rudd and Khanda create a singular concert program from different musical traditions: the pentatonic Mongolian musical folk tradition, throat-singing and American jazz and blues. Traditional Mongolian songs such as “The Camel" and “Behind The Mountains," full of rich tonal sonorities and gorgeous melodies, will be magically blended with Rudd's masterful trombone skills. In the reverse, to hear the straight-up countrified blues of “Buryat Boogie" blended with the ancient form of Mongolian throat singing and their instruments will be nothing short of transcendent.
“It will remind the listener of American folk music and aspects of the blues," states Roswell Rudd. “I call their music 'art folk' because it combines the sophistication of conservatory, western training with the indigenous performance style of their long history."
In Mongolia, the art of throat singing has flourished for thousands of years. The unique vocal tradition - called hoomei by the indigenous people - consists of resonant harmonic overtones created by channeling air through the human vocal folds and out through the lips, thus creating strange octaves, low drones and high-pitched, woodwind-like tones, which enable the vocalist to sound more than one note at once. The Buryat Band is led by Badma Khanda, a vocalist of supreme range and expressive beauty, and Battuvshin Baldantseren, multi-instrumemntalist and throat singer, and three other instrumentalists who play everything from horse-head basses and fiddles to lute, jaw's harp, dulcimer and flute.
For more than 40 years, trombonist Roswell Rudd, a Guggenheim recipient in composition, has been a musical traveler of all the world's great traditions. He's navigated through a myriad of musical forms from jazz to gut-bucket New Orleans, Thelonious Monk to Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra. He co-leads a quartet with Archie Shepp. Roswell Rudd's MALIcool (Sunnyside) was recorded in Mali in 2000 and he tours internationally with this band. He is among America's most consistently inspired and intriguing jazz musicians and one of the tradition's greatest living legends.
The dates are as follows:
October 28 / McKenna Theater / New Paltz, NY
November 1 / Centerstage / Reston, VA
November 2 / Bates College / Lewiston, ME
November 4 / Zankel Hall / New York, NY
November 5 / Hot House / Chicago, IL
November 9 / Royce Hall Auditorium / Los Angeles, CA
November 12 / Florence Gould Hall / San Francisco, CA (S.F. Jazz Festival)
November 12 / UCSC Theater / Santa Cruz, CA
November 15 / John G. Shedd Institute For the Arts / Eugene, OR
For more information contact All About Jazz.
