Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center

Friday, September 4 • 9:00 p.m.
Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber
Soundlab
110 Pearl Street
Buffalo, N.Y.
$10 general admission, $8 members/students/seniors

"After giving us one of the most thrilling and unique concerts of 2008, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber returns to Buffalo to deliver another dose of their special brand of uplifting spontaneous sonic ass-kicking...

Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber began as a grand and noble idea that begat a quite foolhardy enterprise - update Miles Davis Bitches Brew for the 21st century with players who were conversant in a plethora of post-modern musical tongues. What it has become since then is one of the few modern music groups to freely mash-up any and all forms of vocal and instrumental music like it ain’t nobody’s business if they do."

Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber's manifesto:

"Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber was originally conceived in 1999 as a forum for the New York area improvisational musician to compose, record and perform material which reflects the breadth and depth of American diasparan music in the 21st century. The intent of the Arkestra Chamber, through the deployment of Butch Morris’s conduction system, is to make every performance a fresh interpretation of its constituent parts.

Rather than limit ourselves to the straight jackets that the commercial recording industry uses to market contemporary Black Music, Burnt Sugar freely moves amongst many styles, eras and genres to devise its own exciting hybrids. These hybrids are based on a solid foundation of various musical traditions and the use of cutting-edge music technology. In this sense the group mission honors its deepest inspirations, the first post-modernists of American music – Duke Ellington, Sun Ra, Parliament Funkadelic and The Art Ensemble of Chicago.

As with any venture of this ambitious nature, audience development must come in many forms – live performance, magazine and newspaper profiles, and most importantly, cutting-edge recordings, which seem to generate the former two. Because of the necessity to build the TruGroid brand; Burnt Sugar, and its collective, must continually generate new product highlighting the Arkestra Chamber’s continual metamorphosis integrating rhythm and blues vocal extrapolations, rock and roll guitar brio, free jazz horn explorations, 20th century string dissonance and up-to-the-minute electronic manipulations.

Music must be heard – especially music designed to push back current musical boundaries. Burnt Sugar and TruGroid fill a major vacuum in terms of reestablishing a presence and profile for American experimental music on the world stage that is conversant with the idioms and recording techniques of hip hop, drum and bass, jazz and alternative rock. In today’s musical context there are few American bands like the Arkestra Chamber that are innovative on stage and in the recording studio."

“A multiracial jam army that freestyles with cool telekinesis between the lustrous menace of Miles Davis’ On The Corner, the slash-and-om of 1970s King Crimson, and Jimi Hendrix’ moonwalk across side three of Electric Ladyland.”

--David Fricke, Rolling Stone

[text and graphic from Hallwalls press release. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]