Photo: Ondrej Nemec
A concert honoring the 33rd anniversary of the Velvet Revolution and the exhibit Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.
The concert will pay homage to the playwright, dissident, and president Vaclav Havel, the musician, songwriter, performer, and poet Lou Reed, and the music of the Velvet Underground and Plastic People of the Universe that accompanied the peaceful changes for freedom.
Special guests appearances by Laurie Anderson and Theo Bleckmann.
Featured musicians
Dave Soldier, violin, guitar
Ava Mendoza, guitar
Karel Ruzicka, saxophone
Anthony Coleman, keyboards
Jonathan Kane, drums
Ivan Bierhanzl, bass
Jitka Charvatova, vocals
Free and open to the public. RSVP through Eventbrite is required.
About
LAURIE ANDERSON is a writer, director, composer, visual artist, musician and vocalist who has created groundbreaking works that span the worlds of art, theater, experimental music, and technology. Her recording career was launched by O Superman in 1981.
Anderson's live shows range from simple spoken word to expansive multimedia stage performances such as the eight-hour United States (1982), Empty Places (1990), Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (1999), and Delusion (2010). In 2002, Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA which culminated in her 2004 touring solo performance The End of the Moon.
Anderson had created numerous audio-visual installations as well as films- the feature film Home of the Brave (1986), Carmen (1992), and Hidden Inside Mountains (2005). Her film Heart of a Dog (2015) was chosen as an official selection of the 2015 Venice and Toronto Film Festivals. In the same year, her exhibition Habeas Corpus opened at the Park Avenue Armory to wide critical acclaim and in 2016 she was the recipient of Yoko Ono’s Courage Award for the Arts for that project.
As a performer and musician, she has collaborated with many people including Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, William S. Burroughs, Peter Gabriel, Robert Wilson, Christian McBride and Philip Glass. Her works for quartets and orchestras, Songs for Amelia (2001), has been played in festivals and concert halls around the world and she has invented a series of instruments and electronic sculptures.
Anderson has published ten books and been nominated for five Grammys throughout her recording career with Warner Records and Nonesuch. She released Landfall, a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, which received a Grammy award in 2018.
As a composer, Anderson has contributed music to films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme, dance pieces by Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, Molissa Fenley, and scores for theater productions including plays by Robert LePage. She has created pieces for National Public Radio, France Culture and the BBC. She has curated several large festivals including the Vivid Festival in Sydney (2010) and the Meltdown Festival at Royal Festival Hall in London (1997).
Her visual work has been featured in many galleries and museums including in 2003, the Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon in France produced a touring retrospective of her work entitled The Record of the Time: Sound in the Work of Laurie Anderson. In 2010 a retrospective of her visual and installation work opened in São Paulo, Brazil and later traveled to Rio de Janeiro. Anderson’s largest solo exhibition at The Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., titled The Weather (2021-2022), showcased the artist’s storytelling process through her work in video, performance, installation, painting, and other media. Her visual work is on long term display at MASS MoCA and her three virtual reality works, Chalkroom, Aloft, and To The Moon, collaborations with the artist Hsin-Chien Huang, won several awards and were featured in the Cannes Film Festival in 2019. A retrospective of her work will open in 2023 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm.She has received numerous honorary doctorates, prizes and awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and the Wolf Prize.
In 2021 she served as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and delivered the Norton lectures as video, now available online. She has worked on numerous projects in AI with the Machine Learning Institute in Adelaide, Australia where she was artist in residence in 2020. Anderson continues to tour her evolving performance The Art of Falling and is working on an opera, ARK, commissioned by the Manchester International Festival, premiering in 2024.
Her life partner as well as her collaborator was Lou Reed from 1992 onward. They married in 2008 and worked on numerous projects together until his death in 2013. Anderson lives in New York City.
Grammy nominated THEO BLECKMANN makes music that is accessibly sophisticated, unsentimentally emotional, and seriously playful, leading his work to be described as “from another planet” (New York Times), as “magical, futuristic,” (AllAboutJazz), “transcendent” (Village Voice) and “brilliant” (New York Magazine). Bleckmann has released a series of gorgeous and irreverent albums of Las Vegas standards, Weimar art songs, and his highly acclaimed "Hello Earth - the Music of Kate Bush." He has appeared on recordings by Ambrose Akinmusire and Julia Hülsmann. In 2017, ECM released Theo’s recording with his Elegy Quintet, produced by Manfred Eicher.
Bleckmann has collaborated with musicians, artists, actors and composers, including Laurie Anderson, Uri Caine, Philip Glass, Ann Hamilton, John Hollenbeck, Sheila Jordan, Phil Kline, David Lang, Frances MacDormand, Michael Tilson Thomas, John Zorn, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and, Meredith Monk, with whom Bleckmann has worked as a core ensemble member for many years. His compositions have been premiered at Carnegie Hall and as part of the New York Philharmonic Biennial at Lincoln Center.
Bleckmann's accolades include NPR's Top 10 Jazz Albums of the Year and top-five spots over numerous years in the DownBeat Poll. In 2010, Bleckmann received the prestigious JAZZ ECHO award and in 2019 was voted Jazz Vocalist of the Year in the El Intruso Jazz Poll in Argentina.
ANTHONY COLEMAN has been one of the key figures of New York music for nearly four decades. His work bridges the gap between Composition and Improvisation, Uptown and Downtown, and spans a wide range of genres and practices including Free Improvisation, Jazz, Jewish music (of various types), and Contemporary Chamber Music.
Coleman immersed himself in New York City’s forward-thinking circle of genre- confounding composers and improvisers that would come to be known as the Downtown Scene. The first two records Coleman played on, Glenn Branca’s Lesson No. 1 and John Zorn’s Archery, are classics of a then-emerging avant - garde.
Balancing a powerful sense of structural logic and expressionistic color, Coleman has had a prolific career as a composer. His works have been commissioned by the Concert Artist Guild, the Ruhrtriennale, the Festival Banlieues Blues, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars, among others. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, etc.
He has presented his own work at the Sarajevo Jazz Festival (Bosnia), North Sea Jazz Festival (Holland), Saalfelden Festival (Austria), and the Krakow and Vienna Jewish Culture Festivals. He has also toured and recorded with John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Marc Ribot, Shelley Hirsch, Roy Nathanson, and many others.
Coleman has recorded 20 CDs under his own name, and has played on more than 150. His most recent recordings include You (New World) and The End of Summer (Tzadik), both recordings of his Chamber Music, and three solo piano albums. His Damaged by Sunlight (2010) was issued on DVD by the French label La Huit.
JITKA CHARVATOVA was singing from 1994 – 1997 in Prague in the band Fiction founded by Mejla Hlavsa and Vozary brothers. They made three albums: Divnej pocit (1995, Strange feeling), Neverending Party (1996), Noc a den (1997, Night and Day). In 2002 – 2008 she was the main vocalist in the electronic dance band Skyline. In the course of six years, they played concerts at the major clubs and festivals in the Czech Republic but also in London and Paris. They recorded three albums: Urbanica (2004), Virginplatonicpanic (2006), Escapism (2008).
In 2008, under the art name JI, she released her author´s debut called Feed My Lion. In 2011 Jitka took the post of the main vocalist in the legendary band Ocean when they announced their comeback. Together they published three albums: Roxy Live (2011), Ve smiru (2016, (Reconfiguring), Femme Fatale (2018). Since 2018 she has been singing in the project Leading Horses with the band The Plastic People of the Universe and Brno Philharmonic. At present she has been pursuing her project named Mia Bohemia and she is the main singer in the visual and music project Universal Underground based on the works of Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground band.
At the turn of the 1970's and 1980's, musician and producer IVAN BIERHANZL played with Czech underground bands such as Dg307 and The Plastic People of the Universe. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he devoted his time to concert music and producer work. So far he has recorded and released over 60 music albums including several DVDs. He accompanied Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders on bass during one of their last visits to Prague. With the renewed PPU line-up, he performed at Joe's Pub and Knitting Factory. However, his name is mainly associated with the Agon Orchestra, an ensemble for contemporary music, with which he has performed at a number of international festivals including Bang On A Can at the Lincoln Center and Next Wave at BAM.
In 2012 Beirhanzl performed with Ivan Kral, Zuzana Stivinova, Suzanne Vega, Ed Sanders, and Lou Reed at the “Love Is Here To Stay” concert, dedicated to the memory of Vaclav Havel at the Bohemian National Hall in the Upper East Side. As the owner of the ARIS studio (Analog Remaster Instant Studio), he has an extensive audio and video archive documenting the Czech underground music movement before 1989.
JONATHAN KANE is a downtown NYC legend, as co-founder of the no-wave behemoth Swans, and the rhythmic thunder behind the massed-guitar armies of Rhys Chatham and the rock excursions of La Monte Young - and as one of the hardest-hitting drummers on the planet. His critically acclaimed band February powers guitar-driven minimalism into the blues, and the blues into guitar-driven harmonic maximalism.
Jonathan began his career as the 15 year old co-leader of Kane Bros. Blues Band, touring the United States opening for blues legends Muddy Waters, James Cotton, Willie Dixon, and others. He has toured and recorded globally witha galaxy of new music luminaries including La Monte Young’s Forever Bad Blues Band, Rhys Chatham’s 100 Electric Guitar Orchestra, Swans, Transmission, Dave Soldier, The Kropotkins, Circus Mort, Elliott Sharp, John Zorn, Gary Lucas, and others.
AVA MENDOZA is a Brooklyn-based guitarist, singer, songwriter and composer. Born in 1983, she started performing her own music, and as a sidewoman and collaborator in many different projects, as soon as she was legally allowed into venues. As a guitarist, Mendoza has received acclaim for her technique and viscerality. Her most ongoing work is as leader of art rock band Unnatural Ways, and as a solo performer of her own music and works by contemporary composers. In any context she is committed to bringing expressivity, energy and a wide sonic range to the music.
Mendoza has toured throughout the U.S. and Europe and recorded/performed with musicians including Carla Bozulich, Malcolm Mooney (CAN), Steve Shelley, Mike Watt, Adele Bertei, Mick Barr, William Hooker, Nels Cline, Matana Roberts, John Zorn, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Fred Frith, William Parker, Hamid Drake, Object Collection (Travis Just), ROVA, Negativland, the Violent Femmes, and members of Caroliner. She has received composition commissions from film distributor Kino Lorber, new music duo The Living Earth Show, the Jazz Coalition, and John Zorn’s Stone Commissioning Series at National Sawdust. Recordings are available on labels Tzadik, Astral Spirits, SGG, Pyroclastic, Clean Feed, Resipiscent, and New Atlantis.
KAREL RUZICKA is a saxophonist and composer who has developed a singular creative voice that arose from the many pivotal experiences of his life as a jazz artist. Ruzicka permanently relocated to NYC in the spring of 1997 and his debut album You Know What I Mean which he released a few months later was nominated for a Czech Grammy. In 2010 he has teamed up with Ondrej Pivec (organ) and Russell Carter (drums) to form the CPR Electrio. Their debut album was released in 2013 and reveals a deeply creative exploration of groove-based modern jazz. In October 2018 Karel released his new quartet recording Grace and Gratitude with Jon Cowherd on piano, John Patitucci on bass and Nate Smith on drums, for which he was also nominated for the Jazz Album of the Year at the Golden Angel Awards.
Since summer of 2007 Karel is touring worldwide with the legendary jazz singer songwriter Michael Franks. During his career Ruzicka has also performed as a sideman with many other legendary musicians on the global scene George Benson, Dean Brown, Hiram Bullock, Mike Stern, Joe Locke, Bob Mintzer, Ravi Coltrane, Brian Charette, Jon Cowherd, James Genus, John Patitucci, Arturo Sandoval, Nate Smith, Benny Rietveld, Ben E. King, Miroslav Vitous, Ronnie Burrage, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Fred Wesley, Kennedy Administration, Reggie Young and this list is steadily growing.
DAVE SOLDIER is a composer and performer based in NYC. In connection with tonight, he led the band that in 1989 performed the music by the Plastic People of the Universe at the Kitchen, a concert produced by Giorgio Gomelsky that helped bring attention in the West to the PPU and Vaclav Havel and other Czech banned artists: it was said to have a role in their initiation of the Velvet Revolution, the name of which was inspired by the Velvet Underground.
His group, the Soldier String Quartet, was John Cale’s band for 6 years, and he worked with Cale on many Warhol-related projects, including the arrangements for the films Eat and Kiss and the film I Shot Andy Warhol. With Jonathan Kane, his band the Kropotkins featured VU drummer Maureen Tucker, and he performed on several shows with Lou and a show with Sterling. In his day job as a neuroscientist, his new book is Music, Math, and Mind (Columbia Press) and his new CD with Jonathan Kane is February Meets Soldier String Quartet (Spotify, Apple Music).
Project partners
Vaclav Havel Library Foundation, Consulate General of the Czech Republic, Consulate General of Slovakia in New York, Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association, KBC Group, New York Public Library for Performing Arts