Pianist Lewis Porter and Guitarist Freddie Bryant to Perform
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. - Lewis Porter and Freddie Bryant will be giving an impromptu concert on Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 7 p.m. in Chapin Hall on the Williams College campus.This free event is open to the public.
The smallest possible music group is the duet. This does not mean, however, that they only play two lines with and against each other. It is not only that a guitar and a piano collectively command a lot of strings. Especially in the case of this duo, many lines drawn from a vast collective experience in American jazz, African traditions and from the ragas and rhythms of India are woven together in a mesmerizing tapestry of improvisational music that is at once contemplative utterly listenable.
Freddie Bryant, whether through wanderlust or because he is blessed by some god of travel, sure gets around. His musical travels have brought him to audiences in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. A musician at home in his own skin, his ability to fit in is just one of his many great qualities. His exposure to world music and to alternate universes of rhythm and harmony would be the envy of any ethnomusicologist. Brewing within him is a synthesis of many traditions.
It is a responsibility he takes seriously as a performer and composer. Interweaving this material is a passion for this quiet and affable man who earned a Master’s degree in classical guitar from the Yale School of Music and currently teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts in the Africana and Music departments and the Prins Claus Conservatory in Groningen, Holland. As if this was not enough to lend him audience drawing street cred, he has collaborated with Salif Keita (known as the King of Afro-Pop), the Indian sitarist, Shubhendra Rao, the Kenyan singers—Achien’g Abura and Suzanna Owiyo, the Taarab master oud player Zein L’abdin, traditional groups in Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E and Israeli klezmer clarinetist, Giora Feidman. In 2006 he performed in Cuba as a solo artist and spent a week of musical exchange with Cuban musicians.
No less peripatetic, and no less steeped in varying traditions of music, especially the oral tradition of America called jazz, Lewis Porter is a pianist whose music is "founded upon depth and cunning use of space." As a performer he has traveled widely and shares his knowledge, directing the Master’s program in jazz history at Rutgers. He has performed recently with such artists as Bela Fleck, Wycliffe Gordon, Ravi Coltrane, Don Byron, Joe Morris, Badal Roy, and Jane Ira Bloom; he performed in Europe in November 2007 with Dave Liebman. His scholarly activities are no less illustrious: Prof. Porter is a noted jazz authority.
The result is a music which can be enjoyed at a number of different levels. It is a beautiful friendship of music which cannot help but speak to the heart by way of the ear.
