Very Very Circus Legacy Project
Thursday, December 12, 2024 at 07:30pm
The Jazz Gallery
1158 Broadway, 5th floor
Brandon Ross - guitar
Miles Okazaki - guitar
Marcus Rojas - tuba
José Davila - tuba
Noah Becker - alto saxophone & clarinet
Chris Bates - trombone
Gene Lake - percussion
The eclectic sounds and aggregation of musicians of Very, Very Circus is reexplored in this unique ensemble. This Legacy Project intends to reactivate a special time of music creation that started 1991 with the debut release of Very, Very Circus: Spirit Of Nuff…Nuff. It is about reviving this music by Henry Threadgill, this decisive phase of his compositional and artistic work - the extraordinary line-up with two tubas and two electric guitars opened up a new level of sound experience. „I thought of the coupled instruments like the two rails of a train track - one tuba and one guitar on each rail. They could be running along parallel to one another but doing completely different things.“ So Henry Threadgill describes the character of this new founded ensemble, following his Sextett, in his biography „ Very Very Circus! The ebullience of it - the sheer too-muchness! That’s was that sound world was about.“ Very Very Circus embodied a paradigm where the AACM, NYC, and the Caribbean bisected.
After 30 years the band revival includes the original band members Marcus Rojas, Brandon Ross and Gene Lake as well as Jose Davila, member of Threadgills ZOOID cosmos, in combination with three musicians of a new generation: Miles Okazaki, Chris Bates and Noah Becker - Performing Artists, Instrumentalists, Composers, Writers, Educators, Leaders, Innovators, Torch Bearers. This is Very Very Circus! The set manifest works of the Spirit of Nuff Nuff… and Pocket Sized Demons..in the Hope-A-Hope-A, that we can find home in Henry Threadgills music…
The band has already celebrated a triumphant return twice - in May 2023 at the Bang on a Can Long Play Festival in Brooklyn and at its appearance at the Big Ears Festival in March 2024.
The band offered a vivid account of the music, weaving its fabric of intricate organization and improvisatory spectacle into a tapestry of profound delights.“ (Philipp Lutz, Downbeat, May 2023)
