Monk Marathon

Greg Campbell and Christian Asplund, collectively AC/GC will perform all 70 or so compositions by Thelonious Monk, leading up to his 95th birthday on 10 October, joined by a wonderful group of Seattle musical luminaries.

Campbell and Asplund have been playing Monk together for some 25 years. Asplund’s interest in Monk extends to his teenage years, where, lacking jazz instructors or models in his eastern Canadian town, he learned an idiosyncratic jazz piano technique by transcribing Monk recordings. Campbell comes from a venerable dynasty of jazz drummers, and is also an incredibly creative force in free improvisation, using traditional and found percussion, in addition to exquisitely tuned drums and cymbals. Asplund and Campbell can be heard together on The Anatomy Series and Brainstun 2.

Greg Campbell plays drums, percussion, and French horn in many projects, including the Washington Composers Orchestra (WACO), the Tiptons, the Tone Dogs, Ask the Ages, Sol Afrique, and Anokye Agofomma. He has studied many styles of music with figures such as Dave Holland, Bob Moses, Koo Nimo, and Tom Collier, and has performed with Bill Smith, Stuart Dempster, Matana Roberts, Don Menza, Wayne Horvitz, and Ethiopian singer Ali Birra, among many others. gregcampbellmusic.com

Christian Asplund is a Canadian-American composer-performer (on piano, viola, harmonium, electronics) based in Utah where he is associate professor at Brigham Young University. He cofounded Seattle Experimental Opera, which has produced seven of his operas. He has performed with such musicians as Christian Wolff, Eyvind Kang, Larry Polansky, Daniel Good, Francois Houle, Michael Bisio, Robert Reigle, Tom Baker, Greg Campbell, Jessica Lurie, Amy Denio, Gino Robair, and Phil Gelb in a variety of venues and recordings in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and Australia. His scores are published by Frog Peak Music. He appears on CDs on Tzadik, Present Sounds, Sparkling Beatnik, Maritime Fist Gleeclub, and Comprovise Records. christianasplund.net

His book on Christian Wolff, coauthored with Michael Hicks is available on University of Illinois Press and he has published articles in Perspectives of New Music, American Music, and the festschrift, Joel-Francois Durand—In the Mirrorland (University of Washington Press). He is an associate editor at Perspectives of New Music.

Asplund has received commissions from many prominent performers and ensembles and has received grants and awards from CalArts Herb Alpert Awards, Genesis Foundation, Barlow Endowment, Artist Trust, King County, Jack Straw Foundation, and ASCAP.

Of his music, Stuart Dempster has said, “Asplund, in his well-crafted compositions, delightfully teases us on those slippery slopes between composition and improvisation,” while a jazz reviewer has said Asplund’s music “walks a squiggly line that passes through jazz…, free improv, rock, funk and a whole spectrum of ‘modern classical’ styles, including minimalism, serialism and a handful of other ‘isms’...” Other words used by reviewers to describe his music include: passion, panoramic power, pure pointillist, plaintive, painstaking, rhythmically toothy, rocking, remarkable, rollicking, searing, subdued, soothing, submersive, splendid, unique, enjoyable, ethereal, mesmerizing, mind-blowing, otherworldly, absorbing, intelligent, idiosyncratic, distinctive, captivating, bewitching.

christianasplund.net