Sunday Sept. 7 • MUSIC GALLERY PRESENTS
BARRY GUY, MAYA HOMBURGER & JEFF REILLY
Doors 7pm, concert 8pm
Plus special artist's talk at 7:15pm!

Tickets: $15 regular, $10 member, $5 student
Advance tickets on sale at Ticketweb

Barry Guy, bass
Maya Homburger, violin
Jeff Reilly, bass clarinet

Programme:
Anon — Veni Creator Spiritus
H.I.F. Biber — “Die Verkundigung” (Rosenkranzsonate 1)
Barry Guy — “Odyssey” for solo bass
Barry Guy — “Celebration” for violin and improvising bass clarinet
Jeff Reilly — “Klangfarben Waltz” for violin, bass and bass clarinet with improvised introduction
Barry Guy — “Three Fizzles” for bass and bass clarinet
H.I.F. Biber — “Jesus am Olberg” (Rosenkranzsonate 6)
Barry Guy — “Magical Mobiles and a Meditation”
Barry Guy — “Aglais” for violin and improvising bass
Jeff Reilly — “Creatures of Infinite Grace” for violin, bass and bass clarinet, with solo bass clarinet introduction
H.I.F. Biber — “Die Darstellung Jesu im Tempel” (Rosenkranzsonate 4)

The baroque era and today’s modern free improvising scene might be separated by over 300 years of history, numerous technological advances, and radical differences in tonality and structure — but that doesn’t mean they have nothing in common. We’ll find out what these two traditions share when this tri-national trio — UK bassist Barry Guy, Swiss violinist Maya Homburger and Canadian bass clarinetist Jeff Reilly — visits the Music Gallery for the first concert of our 2008/09 season.

Among the musicians who helped forge the British free improvisation scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s, bassist Barry Guy remains a standout figure. During those formative years, he collaborated with the likes of Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and Paul Rutherford, helping them shape new forms of music-making based on improvisation. Simultaneously, though, he was deeply involved in early and Baroque music, through ensembles like Christopher Hogwood’s Ancient Music Society. Furthermore, he has done pivotal work as a composer and orchestra leader to synthesize composed and improvised music-making in a large-group context.

Maya Homburger is a Swiss-born player of baroque violin, and is an acclaimed improviser and interpreter of both period and contemporary repertoire. Guy and Homburger, having met during a tour of the Ancient Music Society, have since been personal and creative partners, managing Maya Records, and performing together and separately in innumerable contexts.

They will be joined by Halifax bass clarinetist Jeff Reilly, with whom Guy and Homburger have forged deep creative ties over the past 12 years. Their relationship began with an audio documentary that Jeff Reilly created on improvised music for the CBC program IDEAS — and Barry Guy was a central subject. They discovered a creative link at that meeting that continued with Barry and Maya visiting Halifax three times over the past decade to perform with Jeff Reilly in collaborations with the Upstream Orchestra and his trio Sanctuary. Jeff Reilly has also travelled to Switzerland to perform this trio repertoire in Wintertuur.

They are a formidable trio, capturing the power of their technical virtuosity into a capsule of astonishing emotional expression, each musician playing with the precision of gesture and clarity of focus that blurs any simple distinctions between improvisation and composition. They do so with musicality and sensitivity that remind us that such distinctions, for all intents and purposes, are moot. Theirs is world-class chamber music, and is as contemporary and vital as it gets.

Artist biographies

Barry Guy is an innovative bass player and composer whose creative diversity in the fields of jazz improvisation, chamber and orchestral performance and solo recitals is the outcome both of an unusually varied training and a zest for experimentation, underpinned by a dedication to the double bass and the ideal of musical communication.

He is founder and Artistic Director of the London Jazz Composers Orchestra, for which he has written several extended works. His concert works for chamber orchestras, chamber groups and soloists have been widely performed and his skilful and inventive writing has resulted in an exceptional series of compositions.

Barry Guy continues to give solo recitals throughout Europe and North America, as well as performing with the Evan Parker/Paul Lytton Trio, Marilyn Crispell and Gerry Hemingway, Agusti Fernandez, Mats Gustafsson and Raymond Strid, his big band BGNO (Barry Guy New Orchestra), and various chamber music formations.

Maya Homburger
Born and educated in Zurich, Switzerland, Maya Homburger moved to England in 1986 to work with period instrument groups. Concerts and recordings as leader of the Chandos Baroque Players and founding her own Trio Virtuoso led her to specialize more and more in chamber music and solo performance. In 1993, she recorded the 12 fantasies for solo violin by Telemann and in 1995, the six sonatas for violin and harpsichord by J.S. Bach.

Ever since meeting the composer and solo bassist Barry Guy — during a tour with Christopher Hogwood’s Academy of Ancient Music in 1988 — she has devoted her time developing her own style on the baroque violin as well as managing the Barry Guy New Orchestra, the London Jazz Composers Orchestra and running her own CD label, Maya Recordings.

The idea to perform baroque solo works in the context of free improvised music and newly commissioned pieces sparked off the Homburger/Guy Duo, and together Maya Homburger and Barry Guy have performed in many major jazz, new music and baroque music festivals all over Europe. After living in Ireland for nine years, they moved to Switzerland in 2004.

Recent recordings include the duo CDs Ceremony (ECM) and Dakryon (Maya), Bach/Guy solo works (Maya) and Folio (ECM), where she appears as violin soloist together with the Munich Chamber Orchestra.

Jeff Reilly is internationally respected as an innovative master of the bass clarinet. The pure emotional accessibility of his rich, lyrical style often masks his remarkable control over a complex arsenal of extended techniques, as well as his total mastery over the full, extended range of his instrument.

He plays with the precision of gesture and clarity of focus that blurs any simple distinctions between improvisation and composition, and does so with a musicality and sensitivity that reminds us that such distinctions are moot.

His trio Sanctuary (with organist Peter Togni, and cellist Christoph Both) has received international praise for its transcendental performances of an entirely unique form of contemporary music. Jeff Reilly also records and tours with Barry Guy, Jerry Granelli, David Mott, and the Evergreen Club Gamelan. As a soloist he has performed with I Musici de Montreal, Symphony Nova Scotia, the Elmer Iseler Singers and in various other groups across Canada, the United States and in the U.K. He has recorded with Warner Classics and his first CD with ECM records as a soloist with the Elmer Iseler singers will appear in the spring of 2009.

Jeff Reilly is also a composer, music producer, and an award winning radio documentary maker.