Jag (1989) for alto flute, oboe, bass clarinet, bassoon and horn
The parts for jag consist of musical fragments repeated in loops with changes of speed and bending of pitch. The players performance allows for considerable improvisation with the parameters set by the composer. The Quintet recorded Jag which is on the CD Self Portrait on the CRI label. For this CD the composer further manipulated the recording electronically.
Through his connections with the Downtown Music scene, Quintet oboist Matt Sullivan introduced us to Elliott Sharp (b.1951), an important driver and participant in avant-garde and experimental music in New York City for over 30 years. A multi-instrumentalist and composer, Sharp has released over 85 recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction. His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt, pop singer Debbie Harry, Ensemble Modern, Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Kronos String Quartet, Ensemble Resonanz, cello innovator Francis Marie Uitti, blues Legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples, pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng, jazz greats Jack DeJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sunny Sharrock, multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe, and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jajouka. Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2014 Fellow at Parson’s Center for Transformative Media. He received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. His work includes scores for feature films and documentaries, sound design for Interstitials on the Sundance Channel, MTV, and Bravo networks, and for art galleries and museums. He is the subject of a documentary “Doing The Don’t” by filmmaker Bert Shapiro.
Jag is published by Zoar Music
For more on Elliott Sharp see: