The Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection and New York music label Blank Forms are presenting a program in resonance with the work of David Hammons. Composer Amina Claudine Myers is invited for a concert on piano and organ. She is accompanied by bassist Essiet Okon Essiet and percussionist Reggie Nicholson.
Music runs throughout the work of David Hammons, a devotee of the compositions and improvisations of avant-garde jazz, a musical style pioneered by African-Americans. The work Central Park West (1990) refers to a song by John Coltrane. The cats lounging on the gigantic tam-tams in High Level of Cats (1998) allude to the nickname “cats” given to jazz musicians. Some of his works incorporate pieces of vinyl.
Amina Claudine Myers is a major figure in free jazz. In 1966 she became a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), after which she increased her collaborations with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and with Archie Shepp.
Amina Claudine Myers
Amina Claudine Myers (b. 1942) is a pianist, organist, and vocalist who has spent her life channeling the spirit of creative music. Myers moved to Chicago in 1963 to pursue a career in music education, contributing her rhythm and blues chops to work with eminent soul jazz figures Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons before becoming part of the first wave of the iconic Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in 1966. The AACM exposed her to the possibilities of composing for small as well as large ensembles, helping her develop her alternately mournful and ecstatic voice as a singer, composer, and arranger. She made her recorded debut on Maurice McIntyre’s 1969 spiritual jazz classic Humility in the Light of Creator, settled in New York in 1976, and has since lent her virtuoso talents to groups and sessions with the likes of Muhal Richard Abrams, Lester Bowie, Henry Threadgill, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Frank Lowe, or Archie Shepp in addition to work under her own name. Myers’s records as a leader are spellbindingly accessible, ascendant extensions of gospel spiritual and blues song forms, with and without words.
Blank Forms
Founded in 2016, Blank Forms is a New York-based non-profit orga-nisation that supports emerging and under-represented artists working across temporal disciplines such as experimental music, performance, dance, and sound arts. It seeks to create new ways of preserving, nourishing, and exhibiting the work of historically established and emerging artists to the public. Black Forms provides artists with curatorial support, residencies, commissions, and publications to help them document, disseminate, and make their work.
Curated by Blank Forms
