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Bio

More about Adam Rudolph and Go: Organic Orchestra

Adam Rudolph

For the past three decades composer, improviser and percussionist Adam Rudolph has performed extensively in concert throughout North & South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Rudolph has been hailed as “a pioneer in world music” by the NY Times and "a master percussionist” by Musician magazine. He has released 25 recordings under his own name, featuring his compositions and percussion work. Rudolph composes for his ensembles Moving Pictures and Organic Orchestra, an 18 to 54 piece group for which he has developed an original music notation and conducting system. He has taught and conducted hundreds of musicians in the Organic Orchestra concept; most recently in Sicily, Naples, Oslo, and Istanbul, NYC and LA. Rudolph recently premiered his opera The Dreamer, based on the text of Friedreich Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy".

Rudolph has performed with Don Cherry, Jon Hassell, Sam Rivers, Pharaoh Sanders, L. Shankar, A.A.C.M co-founders Fred Anderson and Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith, and Omar Sosa. He has toured extensively and recorded 15 albums with Yusef Lateef including duets and their large ensemble compositional collaborations.

Born in 1955, Rudolph grew up in the Hyde Park area of the Southside of Chicago. From an early age he was exposed to the live music performances of the great blues and improvising artists who lived nearby. As a teenager, Rudolph started playing hand drums in local streets and parks and soon apprenticed with elders of African American improvised music. He performed regularly in Chicago with Fred Anderson and in Detroit with the Contemporary Jazz Quintet. In 1973 Rudolph played on his first record date with Maulawi Nururdin and with the CJQ at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz festival..

In 1977 he lived and studied in Ghana, where he experienced trance ceremonies. In his travels throughout West Africa he saw how music can come from a cosmological grounding beyond music itself and can also be about something beyond music itself. In 1978 he lived in Don Cherry’s house in the Swedish countryside. Cherry inspired him to start composing and showed him about Ornette Coleman’s concept and the connection of music to nature.

Rudolph is known as one the early innovators of what is now called “World Music”. In 1978 he and Gambian Kora player Jali Foday Musa Suso co-founded The Mandingo Griot Society, one of the first groups to combine African and American music. In 1988, he recorded the first fusion of American and Gnawa music with Sintir player and singer Hassan Hakmoun. Rudolph intensely studied North Indian Tabla for over 15 years with Pandit Taranath Rao. He learned hundreds of drum compositions and about how music is a form of Yoga – the unity of mind, body and spirit. In 1988 Rudolph began his association with Yusef Lateef, with whom he has recorded over 15 albums including several of their large ensemble collaborations. Lateef introduced Rudolph to the inspirational practice of Autophysiopsychic Music – “that which comes from one’s spiritual, physical and emotional self”. Rudolph still performs worldwide with Dr. Lateef. Their performances have ranged from their acclaimed duet concerts to appearances as guest soloists with the Koln, Atlanta and Detroit symphony orchestras.

Rudolph continues to also create visual art – painting, drawing, photography - and to write. In 2006, his rhythm repository and methodology book, Pure Rhythm was published by Advance Music, Germany. In 2010 Rudolph’s article Music and Mysticism: Rhythm and Form was published in Arcana V, edited by John Zorn. Other essays have been published by Parabola Magazine and Morton Books. Rudolph has been on the faculty of Creative Music Studio ( New York and Istanbul) Esalen Institute, California Institute of the Arts and the Danish Jazz Federation Summer Institute. Rudolph has received grants and compositional commissions from the Rockefeller Foundation, Chamber Music America, Meet the Composer, Mary Flagler Cary Trust, the NEA, Arts International, Durfee Foundation, Phaedrus Foundation and American Composers Forum.

Performances

Go: Organic Orchestra is unique in the realm of approaches to improvisational conducting. Utilizing non-linear notation in an original music score, composer and artistic director Adam Rudolph conducts between 20 and 50 musicians with his prototypical conducting system. Over the past twelve years he has taught and conducted hundreds of musicians in Go: Organic Orchestra concepts in both North America and Europe, most recently in Naples, Oslo and Istanbul. He has on-going ensembles in both Los Angeles and New York. The group was chosen by the LA Weekly as "Outstanding World Music Group" in both 2003 and 2005.

About the music Rudolph writes:

"The philosophical basis holds (seeming) opposites: the score and conducting serve to generate as much aesthetic and functional focus as possible in the music while at the same providing context and inspiration for the greatest expressive freedom possible of the performers. Sound and motion elements include tone rows, synthetic scales, melodies, linguistic shapes, intervallic patterns, textural gestures, modes, ragas, maqams, and plainchant.

The score serves to provide material for both the improvisations and the orchestrations. Motion and forms and are generated through the application of the composer’s rhythm concept “Cyclic Verticalism” whereby polymeters are combined with additive rhythm cycles. In concert, I conduct the musicians in a spontaneous way by using a variety of hand signals to cue and orchestrate the score and direct the improvisations. I seek to generate unusual relationships of sound against sound, form against form, and rhythm against rhythm in a non-linear, ever shifting kaleidoscope of music images: weaving an “audio syncretic music fabric”.

The music is “organic” in the sense that the compositions and conducting serve as inspiration and context for the musicians to express themselves in the moment by using their instruments as an amplifier for their inner voice. Through listening and imagination the conductor and performers inspire one another to create emotional colorations of sound. Rather than the score being a set of instructions of what, how and when to play, the non-linear semiotic (symbols) of the written music are an invitation to discover the potentialities of what can happen when transformed into syntax as expressed through the hands and breath of a group of virtuostic, imaginative, and soulful improvisers."


The Music

Unique in the realm of approaches to improvisational conducting, Organic Orchestra utilizes a composed non-linear score as material for creating the musical moment. Composer and Artistic Director Adam Rudolph has constructed a music score using innovative and experimental means with which to conduct the players through music/letter grids, language themes, Indian Ragas and song forms to create the moods, movement and sonic gestures. The musicians also learn Rudolph's rhythm concept:"Cyclic Verticalism", whereby poly rhythms (used in African music) are combined with rhythms cycles (used in Indian music). Utilizing these elements in an spontaneous way, elements will weave what Rudolph calls an "audio syncretic music fabric" that serves as a platform for improvisation and self expression.