Vibrational Breath & Metals

World premiere of a trio featuring Big Beautiful Man, Randy Sutin, and Todd Zieseniss

Big Beautiful Man wields the ancient sound of the haunting didgeridoo from the Outback of Australia, and conch shells from the many sea-oceans. Fans of avant-garde jazz began to notice Big Beautiful Man in the early 70s, when he entered the New York City loft jazz scene as a percussionist. In the mid-1970s he moved to Philadelphia, continuing his musical activities while simultaneously building his “bread” career as a television and movie cameraman. Around this time, he began to move from drumming and percussion towards specializing in the didjeridoo. Big Beautiful Man has led groups featuring renown players including Byard Lancaster, Sam Rivers, Gary Bartz, Rashied Ali, Calvin Hill, Michael Carvin, Odean Pope, Bobby Zankel, and James "Plunky" Branch. Most recently, he is part of an absorbing trio with tabla player Badal Roy and Steve Turre on trombone and conch shells. (Big Beautiful Man photo credit: Craig LaPlante)

Randy Sutiin was born in Great Falls, Montana, where his parents taught music privately in the home. He studied piano starting at age 4 and guitar starting at age 8. At age 10, he began his study of the drums and moved to Rouses Point, New York, a small border town on Lake Champlain about 40 miles from Montreal, Québec. Sutin began playing music professionally (mostly rock and some country) with local groups at age 13. When he became of age to go to college, he decided to study music, and broadened his knowledge of the rest of the instruments of the percussion family. At age 20, he began to study mallet percussion, in particular the vibraphone, which has now become the staple of his professional life as a musician. http://randysutin.com

Todd Zieseniss has been playing percussion since he was 6 years old. He began with jazz and rock, then evolved to learning Native American folk and world music, African and Latin percussion, and Indonesian Gamelan. Todd Has shared the stage with prominent artists in Native American Music such as Carlos Nakai, Bill Miller, and Kirtan artist David Newman. Todd seeks to expand his knowledge with studies of Tribal ritual and trance music rhythms and has begun to explore vibrational sound healing techniques, all of which he combines with a lifetime passion of percussion to create a unique style of drumming that is a hybrid of many traditional styles from around the globe. https://www.tribalgatherings.com

Manna Pourrezaei

Manna Pourrezaei is a Philadelphia-based synthesist and electronic music composer who explores the relationship between repetition, pattern, randomness, and contradiction through the medium of sound. In the playful spirit of the experimental and avant-garde and with a commitment to mindful living, her hypnotic, slow-evolving improvisational works invite the listener to transcend the rapid tempo and myopic demands of the digital age by tuning into the limitless expanse of sound. Since discovering the eurorack format for modular synthesizers in 2019, Pourrezaei has immersed herself within the infinite world of electronic music-making. The mutable, DIY nature of these indeterminate and highly expressive musical devices welcome the sort of creative play and full participation that she treats as a form of self-healing. While the ability to conceptualize and construct instruments that shape and arrange sound waves according to her own design offers a certain artistic agency, modular synthesis also requires that the creator relinquish control at times, as chance is a feature of these generative technologies capable of randomization and probability. It is this dialectic between control and randomness that appeals to Pourrezaei’s need for a creative medium that challenges ego-driven approaches to art and life in favor of mindful detachment and engagement.

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MUSICA PRACTICA / ELETTRONICA VIVA

sound•conversation•performance•action•practice•music•voltage•audio

https://web.sas.upenn.edu/electronicmusic

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Additional support provided by The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation