Experimental Jazz on Lafond Presents: Motl and Friends

Experimental Jazz on Lafond Presents: Motl and Friends with George Cartwright

Thursday, December 10th, 7pm.

Arts on Lafond: 1697 Lafond Ave. St. Paul.

Tickets: $15 / $10 students. Cash, check, Venmo, Paypal accepted.

This performance is not wheelchair accessible.

(Aaron will not be performing at this show: please attended to hear some amazing experimenal jazz!)

For this concert, Kyle will be performing the music of George Lewis with an all-star ensemble in the first set, and will conclude with a second set of music with George Cartwright.

Kyle Motl is a bassist, composer, and improviser described as “spectacularly adventurous and dynamic,” whose playing is noted for both “iridescent delicacy as well as abrasive force” (The Wire). A frequent soloist, his performances “promise to change us by revealing things we could never have imagined” (Free Jazz Collective).

As a composer and bandleader, Kyle’s ensemble music has been praised for its “speculative, many-layered evolution of imagination,” (Free Jazz Collective) and for “constantly confounding expectation” (Jazz da Gama). Treesearch, with violinist Keir GoGwilt, brings together chamber music, jazz, and improvised excursions in “its own brand of in-the-moment invention, mingling rich tones, rhapsodic gestures, and companionable jousts” (The New Yorker). Kyle makes music in collaborative trios with Anthony Davis and Kjell Nordeson (Vertical Motion, 2023 Astral Spirits) and with Dan Clucas and Nathan Hubbard (Daydream and Halting, 2022 FMR). Upcoming recording projects include a collaborative chamber trio with Rocío Díaz de Cossío and José Fernando Solares and an extended take on the piano trio with Eli Wallace and Nick Neuberg. Other ongoing collaborations include work with musicians including Earl Howard, Carlos Dominguez, Niloufar Shiri, and Wilfrido Terrazas. Kyle has performed and/or recorded with many luminaries of creative music including Kidd Jordan, Roscoe Mitchell, Mary Halvorson, and Wadada Leo Smith. Kyle worked regularly with the Peter Kuhn Trio and Abbey Rader Quartet.

Kyle works regularly with both emerging and established composers and champions new works for the bass. He has performed with ensembles including International Contemporary Ensemble and Ghost Ensemble. His 2022 solo record, Hydra Nightingale, consists of solo premieres by Caroline Louise Miller, Anqi Liu, Jessie Cox, and Asher Tobin Chodos.

Kyle holds a DMA from UC San Diego, where he studied with Mark Dresser and Anthony Davis, an MM from Florida International University, and a BM from Florida Atlantic University. His book, Bells Plucked From Air, sheds light on harmonic techniques for the double bass. Kyle is Assistant Professor of double bass and contemporary instrumental music at University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

George Cartwright is a Minnesota-based composer, performer, bandleader, producer and musical collaborator, with a prolific career spanning over 30 years. His career began in his home state of Mississippi, shaped by a childhood woven through with early memories of singing in church and learning songs at his grandfather’s knee. He grew up on rock-n-roll and fell in love with jazz after hearing Charles Lloyd’s iconic “Forest Flower,” and like the British bands that he listened to in high school, he was also heavily influenced by the blues being played literally in his own backyard of the Mississippi Delta.