In the infectiously ecstatic fervor of Blarvuster‘s music, Scottish bagpipes, Balinese gamelan, minimalism, improvisation and rock converge in a labyrinthine, multi-textural sound. Blarvuster has been a mainstay at New York venues including John Zorn’s The Stone, Issue Project Room, Zebulon, and The Cornelia Street Cafe and has delivered commanding commissioned performances at The Kitchen, MOMA’s PS1, Roulette, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (EMPAC), and The Western Front (Vancouver). Blarvuster, whose self-titled debut CD [listen to sample tracks] will be released on John Zorn’s Tzadik label (11/2010), presents a completely unique form of music played with extreme virtuosity and sensitivity by a stellar line-up of some of the brightest young musicians in New York.

Matthew Welch is an exciting young composer, saxophonist and virtuoso piper who has discovered the hidden nexus of the Celtic and Balinese musical traditions. Matt’s second CD for Tzadik presents two exciting new projects: a beautifully orchestrated opera expanding on the language of minimalism with honesty and originality, and his dynamic touring band Blarvuster, which blends the complex skirls and rhythmic subtleties of the Highland pipes with a vibrant rock sensibility. Featuring the best out of yet another new generation of downtown musicians, this is lush and exotic new music from a fresh new compositional explorer.

Blarvuster will be performing the Mosaic of Iridescence (2010) at a CD Release Party and free Concert to be held at Zebulon, 258 Wythe Avenue in Brooklyn, NY on December 8th, 2010 at 8pm. Also on the bill will be Ches Smith and the David Crowell Ensemble. For more information, call 718 218 6934 or visit www.zebuloncafeconcert.com.

Hailed by Time Out New York as “a composer possessed of both rich imagination and the skill to bring his fancies to life,” Matthew Welch is the director and composer for Blarvuster. Welch has worked with Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins, Julia Wolfe and John Zorn and has also recorded for the Mode, and Cantaloupe labels to name a few. Welch’s previous Tzadik release, Dream Tigers (2005) made both of Time Out New York’s top 10 Classical and non-classical album lists for 2005, adding to the eager anticipation of this year’s release.

Band members include: Leah Paul (flutes), who has worked with TV on the Radio, The Dirty Projectors, and Anthony Braxton and leads her own pop-band The Bridesmaids. Karen Waltuch (viola) has worked with Wilco, Beth Orton, The Walkmen, Jim O’Rourke, Tammy Wynette, and The Roulette Sisters. Mary Halvorson (guitar) is a veteran of the Anthony Braxton Trio and Anthony Braxton 12tet, and the leader of The Mary Halvorson Trio and Quintet. Ian Riggs (bass) has worked with Howard Fishman, Ethan Lipton, One Ring Zero, Hilary Hawke, Likeness to Lily, and The Lonesome Trio. Tomas Fujiwara (drums) leads his quintet Tomas Fujiwara & The Hook Up, and works in a duo with Taylor Ho Bynum and the collective quartet The Thirteenth Assembly.

“The ensemble’s border-busting music is original and catchy. . .Blarvuster is worth sticking around for.” – The New York Times

“Mosher does for music what Renoir has done for art.” – JazzReview.com

“A gifted composer who offers a fresh and updated approach.” – All About Jazz

Rob Mosher is no slacker. The award-winning composer and soprano saxophonist decided to give himself the challenge of a lifetime: write 31 Bach-style chorales in 31 days in celebration of his 31st birthday and blog about the experience. The month-long project is already underway – it began October 20th – Mosher blogs his progress each day at www.robmosher.com and on his Kickstarter site updating about his compositional process and posting that day’s chorale. In addition, he’s holding a fundraising performance featuring live performances of 26 of the 31 Chorales on Monday, November 15th at 8:30pm to be held at Old First Reformed Church, 729 Carroll Street in Brooklyn, NY. Tickets are $10-25 and available through EventBrite.

Mosher is raising $3,100 – through kickstarter.com — in order to fund the recording and digital release of the pieces by his quartet — Mosher on soprano sax, Micah Killion on trumpet and flugelhorn, Peter Hess on bass clarinet and tenor sax and Nathan Turner on tuba. He’s over halfway to raising the funds, which need to be pledged by November 19th, otherwise the project doesn’t go through at all, part of Kickstarter’s unique all-or-nothing approach.

“Successful artists have always worked within their times,” says Mosher, explaining why he’s turned to the Internet for funding. “Bach had the church, Mozart had royalty, and Beethoven, later in his career, funded himself primarily through commissions.”

The music Mosher’s written for this project contains a distinct combination of Bach’s warm harmonies, Debussy and Ravel’s impressionist and passionate melodic phrasing, Stravinsky’s tongue-in-cheek humor, and modern dissonances, all while remaining purely Mosher in how it all comes together.

“Many music students would probably cringe at the idea of doing something like this by choice,” jokes Mosher. “I’m thrilled by the challenge of composing 31 pieces of music in a single month. I think I’ll learn a lot about myself.”

Recipient of a 2009 ASCAP Young Composer Award, Rob Mosher was born and raised in Canada. He graduated with a music degree from the University of Toronto and participated in the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music. Shortly thereafter, in 2004, he relocated to New York City where he is active as a bandleader, freelance oboist and a jazz sideman. He served as principal oboist in the Brooklyn Conservatory Orchestra in 2005-6 and was a member of the 40 Fingers Saxophone Quartet from 2001-2004.

In 2008 Mosher released his critically acclaimed debut CD The Tortoise with his 10-piece band Storytime, which the Hartford Courant called “heartbreakingly beautiful, with melodies that stop the listener in [their] tracks.” Mosher’s other musical projects include a jazz quartet: Rob Mosher’s Supervillains; the Rob Mosher String Quartet, a classical ensemble with soprano sax replacing 2nd violin; and Soprano/Soprano, a classical duo with soprano sax and soprano operatic voice, and a guitar duo with classical guitarist Rupert Boyd.

Kickstarter is the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Every month, tens of thousands of people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields. Launched in April, 2009, Kickstarter has engendered rave reviews as a new model of funding the arts. The New York Times calls Kickstarter “an unexpected influence on indie culture, a new model for a D.I.Y. generation.”

To help fund Mosher’s project, please go to: http://kck.st/bsdEj8

The live teleclass, “Self-Promotion for the Performing Artist”, will be led by Peter McDowell via Artists-Edge.com on Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 5 PM PT / 8PM ET.

This seminar will offer simple tools and strategies for marketing and publicizing artists’ careers, creations and performances. Covered will be topics such as how to create a promotional PDF, a bio and a press release. Procedures for contacting critics, reviewers and bloggers and the media and how to get events listed and CDs or video promoted on the internet will also be discussed.

This teleclass is for Artist’s EDGE Members Only – a 10 day membership costs $5. The class will be held live via conference call (questions are encouraged!) and will be available in podcast form at a later date.

Music/Words, an interdisciplinary series founded and curated by NYC-based pianist Inna Faliks, begins its third season on Sunday, November 21, at 6pm with a performance featuring Faliks at the piano along with readings by poets Sandra Beasley and Oni Buchanan at New York’s Cornelia Street Café. The varied program will include Chaconne by composer Sofia Gubaidulina, two Liszt Etudes, the short work Cathedral Waterfall (from the Etudes) by Augusta Read Thomas and Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit (featured on Faliks’ recent CD release, Sound of Verse on MSR Records). The Cornelia Street Café is located at 29 Cornelia Street, Greenwich Village, NYC. Tickets are $20 and are available by calling 212-989-9319.

Music/Words celebrates links between poetry and music by presenting collaborations between exciting solo performers and acclaimed contemporary poets in the form of a live recital/reading. Inna Faliks created the series in order to foster a chance for poets and musicians to work together and inspire each other, as well as to allow different audiences to come together for these musical-literary events. New published and unpublished works are read alongside performances of music old and new and connected by content, intuition, and inspiration. According to Faliks, “I pair performers together based on their personalities and styles, and encourage them to choose the poems and music in varied ways that are strongly and intuitively connected.”

In past seasons, Music/Words has featured collaborations between acclaimed poets such as Jesse Ball, Deborah Landau and Mark Levine, and musicians such as Wendy Warner, Leon Livshin and Angelina Gadeliya, at performance spaces such as Le Poisson Rouge and Cornelia Street Café. WFMT Radio in Chicago featured Music/Words in regular live broadcasts throughout the month of April 2010. This season, each concert of Music/Words (four concerts, in a variety of venues) represents a different element – fire, earth, water, or air. The other three concerts will be held on March 4 (featuring Vadim Neselovskyi, jazz pianist, and Inna Faliks); April 8 (featuring Sharan Leventhal, violin); and the season finale, in May, (Inna Faliks, poet TBA).

Called “A delight to hear” and “riveting” by Phil Greenfield of the Baltimore Sun, Inna Faliks played her debut with the Chicago Symphony at age 15, and performs regularly at major venues in US and abroad. A winner of many international competitions including the 2005 International Pro Musicis Award, Ms. Faliks has recently performed at Carnegie Hall, Paris’s Salle Cortot, The Metropolitan Museum, Bargemusic, a recital tour of Russia, and in multiple TV and radio broadcasts worldwide. Her CD, Sound of Verse, has been enthusiastically reviewed this year by Gramophone, American Record Guide and other press. Recent festival appearances include Verbier, Taos, and Brevard. A champion of both contemporary and classical music, Ms. Faliks performed the NY and LA premieres of “13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg” – variations by contemporary composers on Bach’s Aria. Her former teachers include Ann Schein, Gil Kalish, Leon Fleisher and Boris Petrushansky.

Oni Buchanan is the author of Spring, a Poetry Honors winner of the 2009 Massachusetts Book Awards and selected by Mark Doty for the 2007 National Poetry Series. Her first poetry book, What Animal, was published in 2003 by the University of Georgia Press. Oni is also a concert pianist.

Sandra Beasley is the author of I Was the Jukebox, winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize, selected by Joy Harjo and published by W. W. Norton. Her first collection, Theories of Falling, won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. Her nonfiction has been featured in the Washington Post Magazine and she is working on Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, forthcoming from Crown. She lives in Washington, D.C.