Enjambre Acustico Urungolo

| Musicians proposals | 2005-08-19

ENJAMBRE ACUSTICO URUNGOLO
I (Jamie Harris),Trevor Watts and the Mexican percussionist Gibran Cervantes will be working together as a trio" Enjambre Acustico Urukungolo" for May/June 2006 .
Trevor played on Gibran's record released last year, which also featured Brazilian Cyro Baptista (Paul Simon, John Zorn). I and Trevor have been working together as a duo now for about two years. We've just come back from a really successful season of touring in Europe, USA, Dominican Rep, Mongolia and Brazil.
The web site of Jamie Harris and Trevor Watts as a duo is http://www.theduo.whistlingmule.com/index.php
Gibran is also an instrument maker and has invented a gigantic percussion instrument he calls "Urukungolo" http://www.perarts.org/UrukungoloEng.html

We are currently looking for promotor representation + offers to play at Festivals .
For :The trio "Enjambre Acousico Urungolo" May/June 2006
Trevor Watts / Jamie Harris duo Sept 2005 onwards

Trevor Watts, Jamie Harris thrive on a higher plane
By Howard Reich
Chicago Tribune arts critic

June 3, 2005

Duos never have been abundant in jazz, but these days they practically have become extinct.

Thanks to a coincidence of programming, however, two breezed through Chicago on Wednesday. They offered an object lesson in why some duos thrive while others stagnate, for the duos represented opposite ends of the artistic spectrum--one brilliant, the other very nearly somnambulant.

Chicagoans will remember reedist Trevor Watts from earlier performances with his Moire Music Group, a kinetic large unit that eloquently merged African and Middle Eastern musical language.

This time, playing at HotHouse, Watts shared the stage with percussionist Jamie Harris. In many ways, their work represented an ideal of duo playing, for their dialogues conveyed tremendous energy while taking listeners into alluringly unfamiliar musical terrain.

Imagine a particularly felicitous merger of post-bebop technique, free-jazz exhortation and non-Western melodic incantation, and you have an idea of Watts' approach to soprano and alto saxophones. Yet whether he leans toward frenetically fast scalar runs or African-inspired, chant-like lines, it was the penetrating quality of his tone that commanded attention. Intense and emotionally unyielding, fusing blues-based timbres with extraordinarily subtle shadings of pitch and inflection, Watts would be fascinating to hear if he played nothing more than C Major scales. But by bounding from piercing cries in the highest registers of his soprano to buoyantly ricocheting figures in the middle, and long-held, amber tones down below, he acquitted himself as one of the most inventive reed improvisers this side of Roscoe Mitchell.

Better still, he found a keenly sensitive foil in Harris, who played traditional African drums with as much tonal imagination and flexibility of rhythm as his reed counterpart. Coaxing his instrument to sing gently at one moment, pulse aggressively the next, then gather momentum a few beats later, Harris produced solos of remarkable fluidity and grace.

Combine his stylistically far-ranging percussion with Watts' exuberantly inventive reed work, and you had the rare duo in which two players improvise freely yet match each other's expressive thrust.

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hreich@tribune.com

Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune

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