Trance Abyss: Performance by Anne Waldman

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS

Anne Waldman, poet, performer, professor, cultural activist, is the author of over forty books of poetry, including Fantastic Caryatids, with Vincent Katz (BlazeVOX, 2017), Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born (Coffee House Press, 2016), Gossamurmur (Penguin Poets, 2013), Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets, 2009), and the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House, 2011), winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. She collaborated with Pat Steir on CRY STALL GAZE, a fine press edition that was published by the Brodsky Center at Rutgers University, and with Cecilia Vicuña on the Tibetan Buddhist inspired Extinction Aria, recently published by Pied Oxen Press. Waldman is the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Before Columbus Foundation Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. She has also worked with a range of artists and performers including Richard Tuttle, Pamela Lawton, Douglas Dunn, and Meredith Monk. A keynote speaker at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India in 2017 and curator of the Voz Alta Festival in Mexico City in 2017, Waldman is also founder of The Poetry Project and of The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University, and a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.

Janice A. Lowe, composer-arranger, and poet has created original music for the “My Time” pilot on OWN, and has produced tracks for Jonestwins TV. Lowe has composed for and music directed plays including “Liza Jessie Peterson’s Chiron’s Homgurl Healer Howls”, “Door of No Return” by Nehassaiu deGannes and “12th and Clairmont” by Jenni Lamb. She composed the musicals “Lil Budda”, text by Stephanie L. Jones, presented at The O’Neill and the NAMT Festival of New Musicals; “Sit-In at the Five & Dime”, words by Marjorie Duffield and “Somewhere in Texas”, book and lyrics by Charles Drew. She has performed with the experimental bands w/o a net, Digital Diaspora. Janice tours as a pianist-vocalist, performing her poetry collection “Leaving CLE”, as a song cycle with groove.  She is a co-founder of absolute theater co. and the Dark Room Collective.

Saxophonist and composer James Brandon Lewis has received accolades from cultural tastemakers such as Ebony Magazine, who hailed him as one of the “7 Young Players to Watch” in 2013. Lewis has shared stages with icons such as Benny Golson, Geri Allen, and Dorinda Clark Cole, as well as William Parker, Hamiet Bluiett, Ravi Coltrane, Jimmy Heath, Jamaaladeen Tacuma and many others. Lewis attended Howard University and holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts.

Ambrose Bye is a musician, engineer, and producer living in New York City. He is a co-founder of Fast Speaking Music with Anne Waldman. Recent albums and projects include: Comes Through In The Call Hold, Oasis at Biskra, Harry’s House Vol. 1+2+3, Jaguar Harmonics, Tiny People Having Meeting, and with Heroes are Gang Leaders: The Avant-Age Garde I Ams of the Gal Luxury and Highest Engines Near/Near Higher Engineers, and Flukum. He has worked and performed at Masnaa and the Ecole de la Literature in Casablanca, Le Maison de Poesie in Paris, the fieEstival Maelstrom in Brussels, the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, Pathway to Paris at Montreal POP 2015, and Casa Del Lago Voz Alta 2017 in Mexico City.  He has been involved in the recording studio and workshops at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University since 2009.

Devin Brahja Waldman is a New York saxophonist, drummer, synthesizer player and composer. He has performed with Patti Smith, Malcolm Mooney, Thurston Moore, Lydia Lunch, Daniel Carter and Sam Shalabi. He has collaborated with his aunt, the poet Anne Waldman, since the age of ten. He leads a NYC/Montreal-based band called B R A H J A, plays in Heroes Are Gang Leaders (founded by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis) and is a member of Artists For A Free World Marching Band led by Patricia and William Parker. As a young’un he was mentored by pianist Paul Bley. With Anne Waldman and his cousin Ambrose Bye, Waldman co-directs Fast Speaking Music—a music and poetry label which has released the works of Amiri Baraka, Meredith Monk, CA Conrad, Clark Coolidge, Eileen Myles and many others.