Epistrophy Arts presents

Nohband
David Torn – electric guitar
Tim Berne – alto saxophone
David King – drums

David Torn’s Nohband is a sonic voyage that defies categories and blurs boundaries, featuring three of the most recognizable names in experimental jazz with Tim Berne, and Dave King. The music has all of the David Torn trademarks: multi-layered textures, thick chords, disruptions, distortions and hypnotic loops. Torn wraps his sounds around those of his band mates, often taking apart their improvisations and reassembling them.

www.screwgunrecords.com
daveking.net
www.davidtorn.net
http://www.thebadplus.com/

“Torn, with his loops and sheer psychedelic abandon, is able to create dense textures, screaming intervallic leaps and dark-hued washes of sound that are as ingenious as they are impossible to imitate.”   Downbeat
 
“His (Torn’s) work is very spiritual, and has an ephemeral quality that I adore.” David Bowie
 
“Few musicians working in or around jazz over the past 30 years have developed an idiomatic signature more distinctive than Tim Berne.”  New York Times

David Torn

David Torn is a composer, texturalist, guitrist, and producer of international stature, renowned for his unique musical voice which seems to span and un-define a range of idioms and styles. His characterful and compositionally textural work has had material impact and influence upon both film scoring – through his own scores, in addition to his creative contribution to scores by Carter Burwell, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Cliff Martinez, Howard Shore, Mark Isham, and others’ – and, generally, upon contemporary electric, electro-acoustic and electronic music.

In addition to the medium of film scoring, David’s creative contributions have continued to grace and assist the works of other musical artists-of-note as diverse as David Bowie, Tim Berne, Jeff Beck, Mick Karn, David Sylvian, John Legend, Tori Amos, Sting, Madonna, Meshell Ndegeocello, John Popper, Jan Garbarek, Jarboe, Laurie Anderson, Kaki King, kd lang, Chocolate Genius, Don Cherry, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Tony Levin, Andy Rinehart, David Douglas, Manu Katche, and etc. 

David was educated by Leonard Bernstein (“Music for Young Composers”), and privately by John Abercrombie, Pat Martino, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Basile. He has been the recipient of many awards including: The Cowboy Award for Best Score (Jackson Hole Film Festival, 2006), a Grammy (for Jeff Beck’s recording, which David composed and mixed), a Bronze Axis Award (NZ), and at least 2 Readers’ Poll Awards from Guitar Player Magazine.

In 2006, David return to recording for Manfred Eicher and ECM Records.

Tim Berne

Tim Berne was born in Syracuse, New York in 1954, and was subjected to a perfectly normal childhood. But he didn’t decide to take up music until nearly twenty years later when he was attending Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, putting most of his energy into intramural basketball. At this point, while resting a sore ankle in his dormitory, Berne encountered a saxophonist who was selling his alto, and bought it on impulse. “There was just something about the sound of the saxophone that got to me,” he says. Musically, up to that point, Berne had always been motivated by all types of music, but especially by the great Stax artists like Sam and Dave and Johnnie Taylor, as well as Motown artists like Martha and the Vandellas and Gladys Knight. This passion for the soulful quality in music would follow him for the rest of his career, a career that he could not possibly foreseen at the time. “I hadn’t listened to much jazz, but then I heard Julius Hemphill’s album Dogon A.D., and that completely turned me around. It captured everything I liked in music. It had this Stax/R&B sensibility and it had this other wildness. It was incredible. That’s when I started playing.” 

Berne moved to New York in 1974, sought Hemphill out, and entered into a sort-of apprenticeship with the elder musician. The “lessons” they had together lasted for hours and covered everything from composition to record promotion to recording to pasting up handbills to aspects of magic and spirituality and, sometimes, even playing the saxophone. “From the beginning,” Berne says, “even while I was still learning to play the saxophone, Julius always encouraged me to write my own music as well. So it never occurred to me that most people don’t play their own music or aren’t bandleaders. I thought that was just part of it. You learn how to play music, you start a band, and that’s it. Julius didn’t offer me one system, but a lot of possibilities, with the emphasis always on ideas and sound.” Berne began issuing his own albums on his own Empire label in 1979.

Over the next five years he would record and distribute five albums under his own name which included such musicians as Ed Schuller, Olu Dara, Paul Motian, John Carter, Glenn Ferris and Bill Frisell. Following two recordings for the Italian Soul Note label, Berne recorded Fulton Street Maul and Sanctified Dreams for Columbia Records. These recordings coincided with an increasingly active worldwide touring schedule. In 1988 Berne began a long relationship with the JMT label with the first of two recordings with the co-operative Miniature (with Joey Baron and Hank Roberts). In 1989 Berne’s JMT release Fractured Fairy Tales was hailed as a masterpiece by the New York Times. Berne’s JMT legacy climaxed with the historic Paris Concerts given by his quartet bloodcount, released in three volumes (Lowlife, Poisoned Minds and Memory Select). These recordings have received unanimous praise. Since 1994, bloodcount has performed over 250 concerts worldwide.

In 1996 Berne once again founded his own record label, Screwgun, and released a three CD set of live recordings by bloodcount, Unwound. He also had a new string quartet, dry ink, silence, premiered by the Kronos Quartet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. 1997 has found Berne touring the U.S. and Europe with bloodcount, writing music for large ensemble on commission, and preparing the next three Screwgun releases by his bands bloodcount and Paraphrase. In addition, a recording of The Visible Man, a piece commissioned in 1992 for the Rova Saxophone Quartet, has just been issued on a disc called The Works, Volume 2 on the Black Saint label.

David King

David King is an American drummer and composer from Minneapolis. He is known for being a founding member of the jazz groups The Bad Plus (with Reid Anderson and Ethan Iverson) and Happy Apple (with Michael Lewis and Erik Fratzke) although he is active in many other projects including free jazz collective Buffalo Collision with NYC “Downtown” musicians Tim Berne and Hank Roberts and the electronic art/pop group Halloween Alaska as well as the noise/prog band The Gang Font with former Hüsker Dü bassist Greg Norton.

King has recorded or performed with Bill Frisell, Joshua Redman, Joe Lovano, Dewey Redman, Chris Speed, Ursus Minor (with Tony Hymas, Jef Lee Johnson, François Corneloup, Jeff Beck, Boots Riley and Dead Prez), Joe ‘Guido’ Welsh, Viktor Krauss, Matt Maneri, Bill Carrothers, Anthony Cox, Atmosphere, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Benoît Delbecq, Django Bates, Meat Beat Manifesto, Craig Taborn’s Junk Magic, Tchad Blake, Tony Platt, Mason Jennings, Haley Bonar, Wendy Lewis, Chris Morissey, Jim Mcneely and HR big band, Peter Lang, Craig Green and his high school big band among others. 

King has also written and performed for modern dance with the Mark Morris Dance Group and for fashion, composing and performing live for three seasons of designer Isaac Mizrahi’s fashion week shows at Bryant Park NYC and for film with the award winning animated shorts “Bike Ride Story” and “Bike Race” by Tom Schroeder. In March 2008 King appeared with The Bad Plus on the Late Night with Conan O’Brien television show playing one of King’s compositions, “Thriftstore Jewelry”.

In 2010 King released a solo record titled “Indelicate” on the Sunnyside label where the drummer plays duets with himself on piano aided by overdubbing in the studio. In 2011 King release the Debut album of the Dave King Trucking Company called Good Old Light on Sunnyside Records. In 2012 King released a trio record of standards featuring Bill Carrothers and Billy Peterson on Sunnyside Records. King also features in the documentary ‘King for Two Days’ which documents a two-night concert held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN celebrating the music of Dave King and featuring performances by five of the bands he drums in. King for Two Days is an official selection for the 2012 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

This project is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division.