JOSHUA LIGHT SHOW with SPIRITUAL UNITY May 30, 2008

Friday, May 30 FREE JAZZ with Albert-Ayler-inspired quartet, Spiritual Unity Roy Campbell (trumpet) Henry Grimes (bass), Marc Ribot (guitar), Chad Taylor (drums), 8 pm

ISSUE Project Room is thrilled to host pioneering multimedia artist Joshua White and his legendary Joshua Light Show for a week of unique audiovisual collaborations. The residency will involve White’s iconic projections alongside an incredible roster of musicians, with a different musical genre represented on each night of the residency. The Joshua Light Show involves a team of video and light artists, led by White and his senior collaborator, Bec Stupak (Honeygun Labs) to improvise live synesthetic visuals behind a giant rear projection screen, involving the “liquid light” techniques he developed at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East during the late 1960s. In addition, each performance of the light show will feature contributions from a different live-cinema artist, including Seth Kirby, Zach Layton, and Mighty Robot A/V Squad. The residency is curated and produced in collaboration with Nick Hallett and concludes a month of programming at IPR devoted to the Ecstatic Moment.

$20 General-admission floor seating (available at the door before each concert)
$30 Reserved chair seating can be arranged by email: reservations@issueprojectroom.org
All performances begin at 8pm

ISSUE Project Room at the (oa) can factory 232 Third Street at 3rd Ave, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11215 F, G to Carroll; F, M, R to 9th Street-4th Ave (718) 330-0313 (venue)
www.issueprojectroom.org

Joshua White is a New York based multimedia artist and television director. He studied theater at Carnegie Mellon University and film at University of Southern California. He is well known for developing the lightshow at the rock venue Fillmore East, appearing with artists such as Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, Yayoi Kusama, and Led Zeppelin, among many others. During this time, he also created special effects for the film Midnight Cowboy. After the lightshow’s performance at Woodstock in 1969, White shifted to television. His directing credits include Seinfeld, The Max Headroom Show, Club MTV and Inside The Actors Studio. In the 1990s, White returned to creating fine art installations in collaboration with Michael Smith, and in 2004 developed a new lightshow with comic artist and designer, Gary Panter. His first show since 1969 billed as “Joshua Light Show” was performed in April 2007 at The Kitchen, which he followed up with a headlining performance at the annual Netmage live media festival in Bologna. His artwork has shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Tate Liverpool, Kunsthalle Schim Frankfurt, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, and the Kunsthalle Wien. The Center for Visual Music recently released a DVD of his “liquid loops.” He will perform alongside German electronic musician Manuel Gottsching for the US premiere of E2-E4 at Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival this summer.

Spiritual Unity is a group formed by guitarist Marc Ribot dedicated to re-creating and re-imagining the music of the great saxophonist Albert Ayler, one of the pillars of modern jazz. Ribot (Lounge Lizards, Los Cubanos Postizos and countless other bands) is a longtime fan of Ayler's and has spent years listening to and internalizing the communicative group process integral to Ayler's music. Ribot describes playing Ayler's music as a "ritual process, through improvisation, of experiencing and presenting the rawest moment of musical creation." He knew that the time had come to realize his long-time dream of forming a collective band to play this music when the celebrated bassist Henry Grimes, who played on many of Ayler's seminal recordings from the 1960s, returned to the jazz scene in 2003. Grimes' amazing reemergence after 30 plus years away from music is now one of the great stories in the annals of jazz. They are joined by trumpeter Roy Campbell and drummer Chad Taylor (Chicago Underground Trio). Spiritual Unity could easily be overshadowed by comparisons to Ayler's original work, but the intentions far exceed a straightforward canonization of Ayler's music. Using Ayler's vocabulary as raw material, Ribot, Grimes, Taylor and Campbell combine their disparate influences to fashion their own distinct work of art. www.marcribot.com

ISSUE Project Room's Joshua Light Show Residency is made possible through Presentation Funds from the Experimental Television Center. The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Official Website: http://www.issueprojectroom.org