Documentary Screening – Mon, Nov 7 – 7:30pm at the KIAC Ballroom
Concert – Thurs, Nov 10 at the KIAC Ballroom
Doors: 7:30 / Show: 8:00
Internationally respected musicians Olivier de Colombel and Romain Fitoussi are joined by an all-stair Whitehorse-based band – Lonnie Powell, Daniel Janke, and Paul Bergman – to perform a tribute to the late avant garde jazz legend Thomas Chapin. Chapin was a versatile multi-instrumentalist, bandleader and composer, in the 80s and 90s, Thomas Chapin led a trio performing his own music playing in New York City’s downtown scene, and at festivals and clubs around the world. An outstanding composer of larger works as well, he sometimes augmented the trio with strings and horn ensembles.
While thoroughly schooled in jazz, Chapin was an iconoclast. For a time he explored jazz in tango, flamenco, and South American rhythms and Latin chamber music. He performed his own Brazilian/Afro-Cuban music, and studied and played with the Latin percussionist Louis Bauza, collaborated with an Armenian oud player, played with an alternative rock group, gigged with a country-western band in Kentucky, and toured with blues-man Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown. To him, it was all music; he never made distinctions. He loved it all.
By 1998, the year that he died of leukemia at age 40, critics said Chapin was soaring and “gaining altitude.” The New York Times called Chapin, “a virtuoso, one of the more exuberant saxophonists and band leaders in jazz. A typical solo of his moved easily between traditional jazz and the sonic explorations of the avant-garde.” Not even a decade after his death, a newly awakened school of disciples and a new-found generation of jazz enthusiasts celebrated his unique, emancipated musical expression.