DOORS @ 7:30 / SHOWS @ 8PM, UNLESS POSTED OTHERWISE
RSS
-
Thu11May2017
GAVAGAI May 11
7:30 Doors $10.00 Suggested Donation
GAVAGAI is a monthly performance series curated and hosted by poet Danielle Blau that brings you poetry and fiction readings scored with original live music by composer-improviser-pianist David Cieri and composer-improviser-bassistMike Brown, with other skilled improvisers (horn-players, cellists, violinists, vocalists, who knows?) often dropping in onstage as surprise guest-musicians. About the Curators (whose recent collaboration at Carnegie Hall can be seen here):
David Cieri is a true artist. Fearless on the piano, a combination of virtuosity, sensitivity and curiosity, he is constantly discovering new ways to express complex emotions through music that has served as the backbone of our films. – Ken Burns
This is real music, not trapped by boxes, definitions and genres, but creating its own style. Cieri delivers beautiful moods…honest, imaginative, fearless. – John Zorn
David Cieri began playing the violin at the age of three, but switched to the piano at the ripe old age of six. He has studied with members of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra and with ECM recording artist Art Lande, and he has performed his original compositions at such venues as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. Cieri’s film-scoring work includes Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War (with Trent Reznor and Yo-Yo Ma, Florentine Films, in post-production), The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (Florentine Films, 2014), The Address (Florentine Films, 2014), Prohibition (with Wynton Marsalis, Florentine Films, 2011), Baseball: The Tenth Inning (Florentine Films, 2010) and the Emmy-winning National Parks (Florentine Films, 2008), Barak Goodman’s Emmy-nominated The Emperor of All Maladies (Ark Media, 2015), and a short directed by George Lucas for The Academy of Arts and Sciences called “The Heart of the Matter” (2014). His original score for Raymond De Felitta’s Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story was listed for an Oscar nomination in 2013.
Danielle Blau’s Rhyme and Reason: Poets and Philosophers on the Questions that Matter is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. She won first place for her poetry in the 2015 multi-genre Narrative 30 Below Contest, and her chapbook mere eye was selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Award and published in 2013 with an introduction by D.A. Powell. Blau’s poems, short stories, articles, and interviews have also appeared and are forthcoming in such publications as The Atlantic online, The Baffler, Black Clock, The Harvard Review, The Literary Review, Narrative Magazine, The New Yorker’s book blog, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Saint Ann’s Review, The Wolf, and the Argos Books poetry anthology Why I Am Not a Painter. A graduate of Brown University with an honors degree in philosophy, and of NYU with an MFA in poetry, she teaches at the City University of New York.
This Month’s Guests