Blaise Siwula
Blaise Siwula (born February 19, 1950 in Detroit ) is an American musician ( saxophones , clarinets , flutes , percussion , string instruments ) in the field of modern creative and improvised music .
Live and act
Siwula began playing alto saxophone at the age of fourteen and was a member of a school band. Under the influence of John Coltrane's LP Om , he switched to the tenor saxophone; other early role models were Art Pepper as well as Ornette Coleman , Sonny Stitt , Archie Shepp , Pharoah Sanders , Sun Ra and other musicians whom he heard at live concerts in his hometown in the early 1970s. After college, he studied music theory and composition at Wayne State University . After his marriage, he moved to San Francisco , where he played improvised music in cafes and wrote poems that were influenced by the poets Hernández , Lorca , Baudelaire , Rimbaud, the beat poets Gregory Corso , Hart Crane and WB Yeats . After living in Northern California for four years, he returned to Detroit and moved to Europe in 1989, where he traveled as a street musician for three months . After returning to the United States, he settled in New York .
After a few years of preoccupation with literature, architecture and art, he tried in vain to get a record deal; finally he distributed his music on self-produced tape cassettes. Since then he has worked in the New York improvisation scene, a. a. with Amica Bunker (1991/92), the Improvisers Collective and with the musicians' cooperative Citizens Ontological Music Agenda (COMA), which at times included over 100 musicians. In 1992 he took part in the live performance of John Zorn's composition Cobra at the Knitting Factory .
From 1999 he had the opportunity to record a number of albums for the avant-garde label CIMP , Konnex Records and Cadence Jazz Records . In the 2000s, Siwula was active as a composer and collaborated with multimedia and performance projects. As an instrumentalist, he mainly plays the alto and soprano saxophone, as well as clarinets, flutes, percussion and string instruments as well as electronics, which he uses as a background for his improvisations. In the course of his career Siwula u. a. with Cecil Taylors Ptonagas , William Hooker ( Armageddon , 1995), Karen Borca , William Parker , Peter Kowald , Perry Robinson , Wilber Morris , Vincent Chancey , Theo Jörgensmann , Fred Lonberg-Holm , Rashid Bakr , Dominic Duval , Jay Rosen , Lukas Ligeti , Hilliard Greene , Joe McPhee , Daniel Carter , Nobu Stowe and Bern Nix .
Discographic notes
- Dialing Privileges (CIMP, 1999)
- Badlands (Cadence Jazz, 2000)
- Tandem Rivers (Cadence Jazz, 2003)
- Brooklyn Moments / New York Moments (Konnex, 2007)
- Projection Zero (2008) with Carsten Radtke
- Live at the Matt Bevel Institute ( re: KonstruKt , 2010) with Dom Minasi
Lexigraphic entry
- Richard Cook , Brian Morton : The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD . 6th edition. Penguin, London 2002, ISBN 0-14-051521-6 .
Web links
- Web presence
- Portrait at All About Jazz (accessed July 24, 2010)
- Portrait in Allmusic (accessed July 24, 2010)
- Review of the album Projection Zero and other projects at All About Jazz (accessed July 24, 2010)
- History of the series of events 2004-2013
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Siwula, Blaise |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American jazz musician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 19, 1950 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Detroit |