Join us for a special live performance of James Young’s True Fluorescent Skeleton, performed on saxophone by Tyrone Page, Jr; opening the night are Anna Crooks and Jarrett Gilgore, presenting spoken word and sound. This show is free, and funded by BOPA’s Free Fall Baltimore program.
True Fluorescent Skeleton is an hour long exploration of memory, machinery, rust, ghosts, cybernetics, and neon while pushing into the utter sonic horizon of the tenor saxophone. James Young (composer) and Tyrone Page, Jr. (sax), got to know each other through musical projects in and around the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, MD. A couple of degrees later and they began this nearly four year adventure working on the Fluorescent Skeleton. The idea for TFS was sparked through an encounter with Jasper Johns’s Regrets (2012), a room-sized art work of false starts and dead ends: paintings, drawings, and prints intermingle with the tools that made them and sketches that preceded them – all pointing to the same subject. This skeleton is similarly arranged. Each track orbits the same single, musical theme, converging narratively and harmonically onto a single melody. Each track is a possibility for development, an abandoned waypoint from a spectral core. Ty is pushed to the extremes of his technique, building grooves of pulsed multi-phonics, marking the limits of breath and endurance, and channeling intense, patient focus into expanding the acoustic universe of the saxophone.
Anna Crooks & Jarrett Gilgore
There are melodies hidden in speech. Anna & Jarrett unearth these melodies and provide a strange new context for poetry. The duo began during Superbowl LI (2017) and has since performed around Baltimore on lineups with Susan Alcorn, Twig Harper, Lexie Mountain, BLUD. Expect a recording to come out in the next 5 years.
Anna K. Crooks is a poet and artist living and working in Baltimore, MD. She is a member of the artist collective Open Space and co-founded the poetry programs Proliferate and Tender F.M.
Jarrett Gilgore // multi-instrumentalist, improviser, composer, and educator currently residing in Baltimore, Maryland. He primarily plays saxophone. He performs actively in the U.S.A. and internationally in a wide variety of contexts. He has performed/recorded with many amazing musicians including Anna & Elizabeth, Dan Deacon, Cass McCombs, Tony Malaby, Lonnie Holley, Rubblebucket, Michael Formanek, Susan Alcorn, Dave Rempis, Jaimie Branch, Tashi Dorji, Dave Ballou.
