If you love music then you’ll have your love to keep you warm this coming weekend. Several performances are scheduled that will beat the ear drums to a variety of beats.
On Thursday and Friday the Bowling Green State University Jazz Program will host bassist Robert Hurst. A master of all media, he has Emmy, Grammys and even an Oscar nod on his resume.
He first emerged on the scene as he helped set the pace for early Wynton Marsalis groups. Since then he’s played with Barbra Streisand, Yo Y o Ma and Sir Paul McCartney as well a host of jazz luminaries. He joinied Brandford Marsalis as a member of band for Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He now teaches at the University of Michigan.
He’ll share the lessons of his career with students in master classes rehearsals and a concert with the university’s Lab Band I directed by Jeff Halsey Thursday at 8 p.m.in Kobacker Hall. Tickets are $7 in advance and $10 on the day of the concert.
On Friday Grounds for Thought, 174 S. Main St. Bowling Green, will host The Suitcase Junket, the one-man band of Matt Lorenz, musician, sculptor and writer.
That Lorenz hails from Amherst in Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley is telling. His music is full of ghosts revived in Lorenz’ dark, rough voice, that nonetheless is very much of our time. His work is a kind of spectral scholarship.
At www.makingwhatiwant.com, he explains what he means by “Giving Life to Dead Things for 25 Years.”
“I see it as an overriding theme in most of the work that I do. When writing songs it is the words that are dead before they are sung into life. The strings of an instrument without a pulse await the fingers to give them voice. A tune tells you how it’s going to be played or written. And when making music in a room the air and walls themselves absorb the sound and change it; responding and reflecting.”
While Lorenz touches on ancient sounds, music of the moment will get its chance to shine this weekend as well.
Friday doctoral students in contemporary music will travel north to the Toledo Museum of Art for the third Ear | Eye: Listening and Looking: Contemporary Music and Art.
Musicians will perform works in the museum’s Wolfe Gallery for contemporary art at 7 p.m.
The idea is to find connections between the art work and the compositions, and even when they are not precise, they can be illuminating.
Also student composers will premiere a series of micro-operas Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. in Bryan Recital Hall in the Moore Musical Arts Center. I’ll be writing more about this project later in the week.
