Event
Improvisations Now
An experience of music imagined and created in real time. This series runs from September 2023-May 2024. Check out the full schedule here!
January’s Performance:
Mark Helias – Bass
Mark Helias is a renowned bassist and composer who has performed throughout the world for more than three decades. After his studies at Rutgers University (B.A. 1974) and The Yale School of Music (M.M. 1976), he began his international career in the Anthony Braxton Quartet. Up to the present time he has performed with a panoply of world class artists including: Edward Blackwell, Anthony Davis, Dewey Redman, Uri Caine, Marcel Khalife, Abbey Lincoln, Oliver Lake, Andrew Cyrille, Marilyn Crispell, Julius Hemphill, Don Byron, Bobby Bradford, Barry Altshul, Ray Anderson, Michael Moore, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, and Gerry Hemingway.
A prolific composer, Helias has written music for two feature films as well as chamber pieces and works for large ensemble and big band. His orchestra piece “Stochasm” was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in June of 2011. He has produced many recordings for other artists including Ray Anderson, Tony Malaby, Bobby Previte, Jerome Harris, and Mark Dresser.
His trio, Open Loose with Tony Malaby and Tom Rainey, has become an archetypal improvising ensemble on the New York scene. He continues performing and recording with BassDrumBone, a four decade long collaboration with Gerry Hemingway and Ray Anderson. Mr. Helias performs solo bass concerts and can also be heard in the innovative bass duo, “The Marks Brothers”, with fellow bassist Mark Dresser. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, The New School University and SIM (School for Improvisational Music).
Anna Webber – Tenor Saxophone and Flute
“Visionary and captivating” – The Wall Street Journal
“Music that appeals to the rest of the body” – NPR Jazz Critics Poll
Anna Webber is a flutist, saxophonist, and composer whose interests and work live in the aesthetic overlap between avant-garde jazz and new classical music. In May 2021 she released Idiom, a double album featuring both a trio and a large ensemble, and a follow-up to her critically-acclaimed release Clockwise. Her 2020 release, Both Are True (Greenleaf Music), co-led with saxophonist/composer Angela Morris, was named a top ten best release of 2020 by The New York Times. She was recently named a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow and was voted the top “Rising Star” flutist in the 2020 Downbeat Critic’s Poll.
Webber is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. She has additionally been awarded grants from the Copland Fund (2021 & 2019), the Shifting Foundation (2015), the New York Foundation for the Arts (2017), the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Canada Council for the Arts and residencies from Exploring the Metropolis (2019), the MacDowell Colony (2017 & 2020), the Millay Colony for the Arts (2015), and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts (2014).
Originally from British Columbia, Webber studied music at McGill University in Montreal before moving to New York City in 2008. She holds master’s degrees from both Manhattan School of Music and the Jazz Institute Berlin.
Joe Morris – Guitar
Joe Morris is a composer/improviser multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, double bass, mandolin, banjo, banjouke, electric bass and drums.
Morris has performed and/or recorded with many of the most important contemporary artists in improvised music including Braxton, Evan Parker, John Zorn, Ken Vandermark, Tomeka Reid, Fay Victor, Tim Berne, William Parker, Sylvie Courvoisier, Peter Evans, David S. Ware, Joe Maneri, Dewey Redman, Wadada Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris, Marshall Allen, Barre Phillips, Barry Guy, Matthew Shipp, Gerald Cleaver, and many others. He has been curating Improvisations Now at Real Art Ways for many years.
To learn more about Joe Morris, please visit his website.
