Durán/Schloss/Mitri Trio

Saturday, February 3, 8pm
Free Event

Hilario Durán, Andrew Schloss, and Irene Mitri combine Afrocuban jazz with live electronics and interactive computer music to create a sound entirely their own. While Durán is a world-class jazz pianist and composer from Cuba, Schloss is known as an experimenter in high-tech interactive computer music in concerts around the world, and Mitri is a lyrical violinist who has expanded into Latin Jazz.  This musical experiment, putting together contemporary Afrocuban jazz and traditional Cuban music with the newest computer music augmentation, has toured across Canada and the United States.

About the RadioDrum

The radiodrum, originally created in the 1980’s at AT&T Bell Labs by robotics engineer Robert Boie and the inventor of computer music Max Mathews, is a "virtual instrument" that senses the performer’s gestures in three dimensions and, according to how it is configured, can make any combination of sounds or images in response. The radiodrum is a descendent of the theremin, one of the earliest electronic instruments, in that it uses capacitance to register position in space (it has six degrees of freedom instead of the two of the theremin). There have been many versions of the instrument over the years: The Radio Drum, Radio Baton, and now the radiodrum. This radiodrum uses only an audio interface to generate, receive and analyze the electromagnetic field around the antenna; there is no “black box” dedicated to this task.

About the artists

Hilario Durán, piano

Voted best Latin Jazz Artist of the Year 2006 by The National Jazz Award, Hilario Durán is a world-renowned jazz pianist from Havana, Cuba. After several years working with Arturo Sandoval, touring at major jazz festivals around d the world, and sharing stages with such legendary musicians as the late Dizzy Gillespie, Durán formed his own band, Perspectiva. In 1990 he joined Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Frank Emilio on Jane Bunnett's Juno Award-winning CD, Spirits of Havana. Until recently, Durán was one of the hidden treasures of Cuban music, but after a successful European tour (1995), he decided the time was right for him to pursue a solo career, allowing him more scope to follow the many different areas of his musical interests. His most recent recording, From the Heart, is a tribute to all great Cuban conductors, and seamlessly merges various jazz styles with those of traditional Cuban music. Since his move to Canada, Durán has become an integral and important part of the Canadian music scene. He currently serves on the Jazz Faculty at Humber College, acting as both adjunct professor of piano and ensemble director.

Andy Schloss, radiodrum

Professor of Music at the University of Victoria, Andy Schloss has a long history of involvement in Cuban music. His first recordings of Cuban music were released on Folkways records in the early 1980's. In the 1990's he was the musical director of the acclaimed ¡Afrocubanismo! Festival at Banff, in which many of Cuba's top artists participated. He has been collaborating with leading Cuban pianists for several years, experimenting in the area between Afro-Cuban jazz and electroacoustic music. These experiments began in Paris in the 1980's with pianist Jeff Gardner, and have continued with Chucho Valdés, Ernán López-Nussa, Jovino Santos Neto, and now with Hilario Durán.

Schloss is a pioneer in new musical instruments, and a virtuoso on a new instrument called the radiodrum, a direct descendent of the theremin that uses capacitance to sense the position of mallets in three dimensions and maps these data in real time to sound and image. He has received numerous awards and fellowships: Fulbright Scholar in France at IRCAM, collaborative composer's grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, research fellowship from the BC Advanced Systems Institute, creative grant from La fondation Daniel Langlois, a New Media Initiative grant jointly awarded from the Canada Council for the Arts and NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council), among others. He is also co-founder of Fundamento Productions, which has released two classics of Cuban music: Ilú Añá: Sacred Music of Cuba, and ¡Afrocubanismo!. In September 2001, Schloss was co-organizer of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) in Havana, Cuba. In 2005, he was the music chair of the NIME conference (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) at UBC in Vancouver.

Irene Mitri, violin

Irene Mitri is a classically-trained violinist and educator who has degrees from The Cleveland Institute of Music, Yale University and Harvard University, in both violin performance and education. Her teachers include Mischa Mischakoff, David Cerone, Bernhard Goldschmidt and Paul Kantor. Irene has since "crossed over" into Cuban and jazz styles, playing with Chucho Valdés, Richard Egües, Los Van Van and other legends of Cuban music. Her Seattle-based charanga group, Orchestra Zarabanda (formerly Yerbabuena) is one of the few on the West coast, and can be heard on their CD entitled Vaiven de Mar and upcoming CD Gallo Que Canta. Mitri has a busy teaching studio in Seattle, and is currently on the performance faculty at Cornish College for the Arts.

- top -