Portland Conservatory of Music

Caroline Davis and Wendy Eisenberg with Rhubarb @ SPACE Gallery
2024-04-18 20:00 (America/New_York) | SPACE, 538 Congress St, Portland, ME 04101, Portland, ME, 04101, US
Esteemed composers and improvisors Wendy Eisenberg and Caroline Davis celebrate the April release of their inside-outside songs record.

Improvisers, composers, songwriters, and friends, Wendy Eisenberg and Caroline Davis celebrate the April release of their inside-outside songs and improv duo album Accept When at SPACE.
Wendy Eisenberg and Caroline Davis wrote Accept When between 2022 and 2023, after a long, beautiful period improvising together intimately in the safety of a friend’s practice space. Our friendship, the quality of attention that colored the light of that and all our other practice spaces, became the basis for our activity and growth as songwriters and our relationship as improvisers. Friendship, how we relate to each other, is their nucleus: the central and essential part of their movement; the positively charged central core of their atom.
A nucleus is supposed to be an especially essential form in eukaryotic cells. Their nuclei are surrounded by a membrane, which in that world permits them to be said to have “true nuclei.” Even their smallest parts, their organelles (incidentally also the name of Caroline’s keyboard heard throughout the record), are held by that membrane. The deepening of their musical friendship, the affordance of space they give to the possibility of synchronicity, the reminders they write of the preciousness of our existence — all of this they put into these songs for you, to help us all accept these miracles and metaphors, in our lifeboats.
Alive with nurturing visions of simple sonic offerings to morph our present situation, Caroline Davis’ main reason for playing music is to connect with others, beckoning new vistas among curious listeners. Her musical journey began in Singapore, in a humid climate, hearing sounds underwater that she would recreate by singing to her German shepherd dogs, who treated her as their own. Her family moved to the United States, Atlanta, Georgia, around age 6, where she encountered R&B and gospel music rife with horns that called her to choose the saxophone 6 years later. Today, Caroline’s music covers a wide range of styles, owed to this shifting environment. As a leader, she has released seven albums, and her active projects include Portals, My Tree, and Alula. Her work has garnered much praise from NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Wire, and a host of international publications.
Davis has shared the stage with Lee Konitz, Rajna Swaminathan, Michelle Boulé, Angelica Sanchez, John Zorn, Bari Kim, The Femme Jam, Matt Mitchell, Terry Riley, Miles Okazaki, and Billy Kaye. Outside of these performance relationships, she has been involved with the following mentorship communities: IAJE’s Sisters in Jazz, the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Program, and Mutual Mentorship for Musicians. Grants and residencies supporting a grateful Caroline include: Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chamber Music America, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Hill, Civitella, BringAbout Residency, The Jazz Gallery, and MacDowell. Some of her compositional practice integrates music with cognitive science, influenced by her Ph.D in Music Cognition.
Caroline is an advocate for social justice in the realms of gender (Jazz & Gender at The New School and This Is a Movement) and in the movement for carceral justice (Justice for Keith Lamar).
Over the last five years or so Wendy Eisenberg has been keeping listeners guessing. Nominally an improvising guitarist, they don’t recognize any musical limitations, perpetually finding ways to apply a deeply exploratory practice to a wide variety of contexts. Eisenberg plays solo guitar as well as banjo in both acoustic and electric settings, warped post-punk songs in the trio Editrix, delicately dangerous guitar music in the critically acclaimed Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, country-free jazz in the band Darlin’, with Lester St. Louis and Ryan Sawyer, febrile post-Prime Time free jazz in Strictly Missionary, and punk-prog in a trio with Trevor Dunn and Ches Smith. As Eisenberg told fellow guitarist Nick Millevoi in an interview for Premier Guitar in 2021, “I need to be in a punk band at the same time as I need to be playing free improv at the same time as I need to be playing songs. All at the same time—otherwise none of the practices will work for me.” Their musical range isn’t a glib manifestation of eclecticism, but a genuine artistic essence.
Eisenberg has collaborated with a disparate array of musicians from all points along the creative music spectrum, including Bill Orcutt, Allison Miller, Shane Parish, Francisco Mela, Carla Kihlstedt, John Zorn, and Caroline Davis. They have released music on Tzadik, VDSQ, Ba Da Bing! Records, Garden Portal, Feeding Tube, Out of Your Head, and Dear Life Records, and performed everywhere from intimate basements to international festivals including Moers, Le Guess Who? and Big Ears. They also write words about music and other things, and have published work in John Zorn’s Arcana series, The Contemporary Music Review, Talkhouse, and Sound American.

Mary Lou Williams: The Lady who Swings the Band | WMPG Jazz at the Movies
2024-03-30 19:00 | Portland Conservatory of Music, 28 Neal St, Portland, ME, 04102, United States
In celebration of Women’s History Month, WMPG’s Jazz At The Movies and the Portland Conservatory of Music are proud to present the award-winning documentary Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band.
One of the greatest jazz pianists, composers, and arrangers of all time, Mary Lou Williams was a walking history of jazz. A child prodigy who could play everything from classical to boogie woogie and swing, to bebop and beyond, Williams was an innovator who helped create the sound of 20th century America. As a black woman in jazz, she faced the ever persistent challenges of sexism and racism, but Mary Lou never allowed that to stop her. She wrote wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and was a mentor to such musicians as Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. After converting to Catholicism in the mid 1950s, Williams devoted her later years to caring for musicians in need and teaching younger generations about jazz’s rich African American heritage.
It’s FREE and it’s bound to swing.

Ornette: Made in America | WMPG Jazz at the Movies
2024-01-27 19:00 | Portland Conservatory of Music, 28 Neal St, Portland, ME, 04102, United States
WMPG’s Jazz At The Movies and Portland Conservatory of Music are proud to present a rare screening of Ornette: Made in America, a movie about Ornette Coleman, the saxophonist and musical visionary who virtually reinvented jazz with his groundbreaking recording The Shape Of Jazz To Come.
Spliced together from clips of Ornette’s boyhood in Texas, home videos, interviews, and footage of his astounding performances with his band PrimeTime, Ornette: Made in America is not your standard biopic. Created by his cinematographer friend Shirley Clarke, a pioneering female director way ahead of her time, Ornette: Made in America, is an extraordinary free form film that looks the way Ornette sounds.
Woven in with the music are interviews between Ornette and friends including William S. Burroughs, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Buckminster Fuller, and Yoko Ono among others. “This is not just a film about a great musician.. It is, as the title suggests, also a film about America.”
And as an extra special treat, two members of Ornette’s PrimeTime band, guitarist Kenny Wessel and pianist Dave Bryant, will introduce the move beforehand and add some personal anecdotes about their pal Ornette.
Please join us for this fascinating evening of Jazz At The Movies, Saturday, Jan. 27th at 7:00 PM, at the Portland Conservatory of Music, 28 Neal St., Portland. Admission is free; reservations are not required.

Diane Walsh Masterclass
2024-01-14 17:00 - 19:00 | Portland Conservatory of Music, 28 Neal St, Portland, ME, 04102, United States
