SASSAS proudly presents sound. at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook: Bobb Bruno, Dan Clucas, and Simone Forti, a FREE public concert featuring guitarist Bobb Bruno, trumpeter Dan Clucas, and choreographer Simone Forti, a free public concert featuring new works by experimental guitarist Bobb Bruno and trumpeter Dan Clucas, as well as a performance of a seminal work by Simone Forti. Commissioned by SASSAS, and performed with the entire Los Angeles basin as a backdrop, the concert offers an exciting aural re-imagining of this iconic and historically complex hilltop.
The commissioned artists are presenting works spanning the terrain of the Overlook. Dan Clucas kicks off the afternoon at the northeastern amphitheater and will be joined by Carlos Alvidrez, Brian Christopherson, Jeremy Keller, Eric Sbar, Andy Sykora, and Kris Tiner in roaming improvisations across the hillside. Guitarist, multi-instrumentalist and producer Bobb Bruno, widely known as half of the alternative pop duo Best Coast, follows at the open air pavilion near the Visitor Center. Renowned choreographer Simone Forti concludes the afternoon with Huddle (1961) as interpreted by volunteer performers from the MOCA Teen Program along the Skyline Terrace at the Overlook summit.
Download a map of the performances.
The Baldwin Park Scenic Overlook is unique in the greater Los Angeles area and California State Park system. A historically complex site, the Overlook offers 360 degree views of the Los Angeles Basin as it resides at the juncture of industry and parkland / preserve. Adjacent to the location of the 1963 Baldwin Hills Dam break and just north of an active oil field, the park was the site of a decade long development battle which was successful in fending off a 230-home development, but failed to stop the flat topping of the hill. Parts of the park have been regraded and, “in certain ways the land still looks as though it’s recovering from the earlier violence.” (Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times).
This concert is made possible in part by a Culver City Performing Arts Grant with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment.
About the Artists:
Bobb Bruno
Bobb Bruno is a guitarist, multi-instrumentalist and producer, widely known as half of the alternative pop duo, Best Coast. He was also member of Polar Goldie Cats, The Uphill Gardeners, Goliath Bird Eater and The For Carnation. Bruno has a long-standing interest in experimental music, merging ambient tonal drones with clangy pop-riffs. He has participated in a number of SASSAS concerts, including Noisy Night (2007), and Mapping Sound SASSAS 10th Anniversary Concert (2009). This will be his first solo commission with SASSAS.
Dan Clucas, photo by Dave Travis
Dan Clucas began playing trumpet at age ten and started playing in school jazz groups a couple of years later, becoming a lifelong devotee of the music upon first hearing An Electrifying Evening With the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet at fifteen. Later forays into the music of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and the Art Ensemble of Chicago led to an appreciation of a diverse array of artists in the African-American music continuum. Clucas has studied with cornetist Bobby Bradford and trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith, and has performed and recorded extensively with his own bands as well as in long-standing collaborative units such as Dead Air Trio, DO TELL, and Brainchildren of Xenog. He has also performed and/or recorded with guitarists Nels Cline, Eugene Chadbourne and Joe Baiza, bassist Steuart Liebig, trombonist Michael Vlatkovich, hornist Tom Varner and saxophonist Vinny Golia.
Featuring:
Carlos Alvidrez – trombone
Brian Christopherson – drumset
Dan Clucas – cornet
Jeremy Keller – guitar
Eric Sbar – euphonium
Andy Sykora – gongs
Kris Tiner – piccolo trumpet
Camera: Naotaka Hiro, Image courtesy of the artist and The Box, LA
Simone Forti is a dancer/choreographer/artist/writer based in Los Angeles. In 1955 she began dancing with Anna Halprin who was doing pioneering work in dance improvisation. After studying and performing with Halprin in the San Francisco Bay area for four years, Forti moved to New York where she studied composition at the Merce Cunningham Studio with educator/musicologist Robert Dunn. In these classes, which focused on the work of John Cage, she met and began working informally with choreographers including Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve Paxton. In the spring of 1961 Forti presented a full evening of pieces she called Dance Constructions, at Yoko Ono’s loft studio. These pieces, which included Huddle, proved to be influential in both the fields of dance and visual arts.
Over the years Forti returned to improvisation as her basic way of working, and since the early 1980s she has been developing an improvisational form wherein movement and words spontaneously weave together. Taking the news as her subject mater, Forti calls these performances News Animations. Forti’s book, Handbook in Motion: An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance, was published in 1974 by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. It is distributed by Contact Editions. In 2005 Forti was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in dance, and in 2011 she received a Yoko Ono Lennon Award for Courage in the Arts. She is represented by The Box.
–
Featuring Volunteer Performers from the MOCA teen program:
Aitana Cantú
Mariana Barajas
Pazia Bermudez-Silverman
Tea Blatt
Natalia Garban
Brenda Garcia
Ramona Gomez
Sarah Isenberg
Isabella Juarez
Somi Jun
Ben Lederman
Josue Lopez
Sophia Pina
Nico Young
Angel Zabala
