Sarah Manning’s Underworld Alchemy, ft.Suzanne Farrin and William Hooker

Sarah Manning’s Underworld Alchemy, ft.Suzanne Farrin and William Hooker

Sat, Jun 25, 2022 7:30 PM

This brand new trio will be performing a version of Manning’s work Transmuting Anger, a series of melodic fragments cued by alchemy symbols and tied together with improvised music, focused on the exploration of women’s anger around sexism and sexual harassment.

Sarah Maning is a saxophonist and composer. She has released four critically acclaimed albums. Harmonio s Creature (Posi-Tone) received 4 stars in Down Beat Magazine, and was on multiple jazz top ten lists including the Los Angeles Times, Hank Shteamer’s list at Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches, and Burning Ambulance. She is a recipient of a 2021 NYSCA composer commission and a MAP Fund 2020 and 2021 grantee for We Will Not Be Composed, a new multimedia work in collaboration with author and activist Soraya Chemaly to challenge perceptions of women’s anger in America from silence to somatization to explosion. In addition to being a MacDowell Fellow in composition (2012, 2021), she has received grants from the Northampton Arts Council and the Puffin Foundation to support performances that break down the barrier between artist and audience. As a bandleader she has performed at venues including NYC’s Winter Jazzfest, the Earshot Jazz Festival in Seattle, Dizzy’s Club Cola, Roulette, Yoshi’s and the Tanglewood Jazz Festival. She has also performed at The Hundred Years Gallery (London) and the Saalfelden Jazz Festival (Austria, with Zion 80). As a side person she has worked with Briggan Krauss, Ebony Bones, Aram Bajakian, Monique Mizrahi, Jessica Ackerley, and William Hooker. She can most recently be heard on William Hooker’s 2021 release Big Moon, on the duo album Metallurgy (2020) with UK guitarist Alex Ward, and on guitarist Jessica Ackereley’s A New Kind of Water.

Suzanne Farrin is a composer who explores the interior worlds of instruments and the visceral potentialities of sound. Her music has been performed by some of the great musicians of today on stages across the globe and featured featured at venues and festivals including The BBC Proms (with the JACK Quartet), The LA Phil (with So? Percussion), The Gothenburg Art Biennial, BAM NextWave, Theaterforum (Germany), Town Hall Seattle, Carnegie’s Weill Hall, Symphony Space, Carnegie Hall, The Stone, and many others.

In addition to composing, Suzanne is a performer of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument created by the engineer Maurice Martenot in France in the 1920s as a response to the simultaneous destruction and technological advances of WWI. Her life as an interpreter on the instrument has taken her to venues such as the Abrons Arts Center in NYC, Centro de Artes in Buenos Aires as well as television and film, including a feature in an episode of the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle and in the films Chicuarotes directed by Gael Garci?a Bernal, and the Iranian film Sade Ma’bar (Blockage) directed by Mohsen Gharaie.

Corpo di Terra (New Focus Recordings) is her debut album and Dolce la morte (Tundra), her second release, came out in November 2018. She was the 2017 Frederic A. Juilliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize winner in Composition and she is currently a Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition.

William Hooker (drummer,composer and poet) has created works that range from jazz and new music to experimental genres. He has released over 70 CDs as a leader. Mr. Hooker has performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Edgefest Jazz Festival, The Vision Festival, The David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, The Wadsworth Atheneum, Queen Elizabeth Hall, The Walker Art Center,the first on MTV, The Kitchen, Roulette, Real Art Ways. He has also presented his work at the JVC Jazz Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, Vancouver Jazz Festival, CMJ Music Festival,Vilnius Jazz Festival, Experimenta Argentina,The Knitting Factory and the Victoriaville Music Festival.

William Hooker has received commissions and support from the New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, Tokio Marine Insurance Company, Colleges and Universities such as Oberlin, Fordham, Columbia, New York University, Boston University, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale and many more.

Accompanying musicians have included Billy Bang, David Ware, William Parker, Thurston Moore, David Soldier, Roy Campbell, DJ Spooky, Steven Bernstein, Zeena Parkins, Lee Ranaldo, Jason Hwang, Sabir Mateen, Elliot Sharp, David Murray, Ted Daniel, JD Parran and many more. His latest release, Big Moon, is now available on ORG Music as a download, CD, or a special double LP with William’s poetry in the gatefold jacket.