Featuring: Anthony Coleman (piano), Henry Fraser (bass), Francisco Mela (drums).

Firehouse 12 is very pleased to welcome acclaimed New York City based pianist Anthony Coleman in his first appearance on the Jazz Concert Series roster. He has been one of the key figures on New York's music scene for nearly four decades. His work bridges the gap between Composition and Improvisation, Uptown and Downtown, and spans a wide range of genres and practices including Free Improvisation, Jazz, Jewish music (of various types), and Contemporary Chamber Music. At the dawn of the 1980s, after earning a Masters Degree in Composition from the Yale School of Music, Coleman immersed himself in New York City’s forward-thinking circle of genre-confounding composers and improvisers that would come to be known as the Downtown Scene. The first two records Coleman played on, Glenn Branca’s Lesson No. 1 and John Zorn’s Archery, are classics of a then-emerging avant-garde. Coleman's new trio, with bassist Henry Fraser and drummer Francisco Mela, will explore a set of all new music uniting Coleman's love for groove, avant strategies and the composition/improvisation dialectic.

In a review in Rolling Stone of the John Zorn produced album, Six Encomiums for Cecil Taylor, Hank Shteamer wrote "[o]n "April 5th, 2018" — named for Taylor’s death date — after constructing a kind of sonic pyre out of thundering, luminous chords, Anthony Coleman moves into plaintive, unmistakably bluesy phrases, evoking both his own ragtime expertise and Taylor’s love for early jazz piano greats such as Fats Waller and Duke Ellington."

Coleman has had a prolific career as a composer. His works have been commissioned by the Concert Artist Guild, the Jerome Foundation, the Ruhrtriennale, the Festival Banlieues Blues, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars, among others. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, etc. He has presented his own work at the Sarajevo Jazz Festival (Bosnia), North Sea Jazz Festival (Holland), Saalfelden Festival (Austria), and the Krakow and Vienna Jewish Culture Festivals. Ensembles led by Coleman have recorded extensively for Tzadik and include the trio Sephardic Tinge and Selfhaters Orchestra. He has also toured and recorded with John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Marc Ribot, Shelley Hirsch, Roy Nathanson, and many others.  Coleman has recorded 15 CDs under his own name, and has played on more than 150. His most recent recordings are You (New World) and The End of Summer (Tzadik). His Damaged by Sunlight (2010) was issued on DVD by the French label La Huit.  He has been a member of the faculty of the New England Conservatory since 2006 and has also taught at Bennington College, the Bard MFA program, and the Mannes College of Music.

Learn more at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Coleman