Ming Mei Residency Concert: Amir ElSaffar and Susie Ibarra

Two of the most inventive figures in contemporary improvised music share a single evening in Paine Hall, in a program that puts tuning, timbre and place at its center.

Trumpeter, vocalist and composer Amir ElSaffar presents his New Quartet: ElSaffar on trumpet and voice, Terri Lyne Carrington on drums, Tania Giannouli on piano and Ole Mathisen on tenor saxophone. The group expands ElSaffar's working trio with Mathisen and Fujiwara through the addition of the Greek pianist Giannouli, and first played together in 2023 at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, a meeting released last year on Maqām Records. For this piece, the piano is retuned to ElSaffar's own microtonal scheme, which pulls seven of the twelve pitches away from equal temperament, one by a full quarter-tone.

Percussionist and composer Susie Ibarra’s Sky Islands was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Music and premiered at Asia Society in New York in July 2024. Commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation, it is performed here by her ensemble Talking Gong (Ibarra, pianist Alex Peh, flutist Claire Chase) with guest percussionist Levy Lorenzo and the Parker Quartet. Ibarra took the piece from the broadleaf forests of northern Luzon in the Philippines, an endangered region with thirty-one endemic species, and built it on the interlocking rhythms and melodies of Kalinga and Cordilleras bamboo, gong and flute music. She has described it as a call to action on biodiversity and climate. Ibarra writes for kulintang gong sets, sarunay xylophones, drumset, gongs and cymbals, bamboo poles laid across the floor, and living plants wired with contact microphones, alongside string quartet and electronics.
 

Curated and hosted by Claire Chase. Presented by the Department of Music and Arts Thursdays.