Thurston Moore Anne Waldman Clark Coolidge
Fast Speaking Music
The Kessler
January 13
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THURSTON MOORE is an American musician best known as a singer, songwriter and guitarist of Sonic Youth. He has also participated in many solo and group collaborations outside Sonic Youth, as well as running the Ecstatic Peace! record label. Moore was ranked 34th in Rolling Stone‘s 2004 edition of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” In May 2012, Spin published a staff-selected top 100 ranking Moore and his Sonic Youth bandmate Lee Ranaldo together on number 1.
In 2012, Moore started a new band Chelsea Light Moving, with their first track, “Burroughs”, released as a free download.Chelsea Light Moving’s eponymous debut was released on March 5, 2013.
“Thurston Moore has recorded three albums with Anne Waldman, Clark Coolidge, and Fast Speaking Music”
FIVE FACTS ABOUT ANNE WALDMAN
1966 – Founding member of the Saint Marks Poetry Project, New York City
1974 – Founding member with Allen Ginsberg of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at The Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado
1976 – Travels with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue
1978 – Busted along with Allen Ginsberg and Daniel Ellsberg protesting at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility in Boulder Colorado
2011 – Elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets
2015 - American Book Award Lifetime Achievement Award
Internationally recognized and acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. Yet she remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language and states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. Her work is energetic, passionate, panoramic, fierce at times.
She has also collaborated extensively with a number of artists, musicians, and dancers, including George Schneeman, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Donna Dennis, and Pat Steir, and the theatre director Judith Malina. Her play “Red Noir” was produced by the Living Theatre and ran for nearly three months in New York City in 2010. She has also been working most recently with other media including audio, film and video, with her husband, writer and video/film director Ed Bowes, and with her son, musician and composer Ambrose Bye. Publishers Weekly recently referred to Waldman as “a counter-cultural giant.”
CLARK COOLIDGE: Born in 1939 and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, experimental poet and jazz musician Clark Coolidge has been connected to both the Language movement and the New York School. His poetry utilizes syntactical and sonic patterns to engage, and generate, meaning. In a 1968 poetics statement, he noted, “Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity.” Reviewing Coolidge’s collection This Time We Are Both (2010), Olga Zilberbourg observed, “[It] is not a work of a cultural tourist, and neither is it a work of an artist whose sole interest is in creating wordscapes. In this long poem, Coolidge is a mature poet who is aware not only of the deep cultural contexts of his words, but also is aware of his poetry being read in political contexts.”
Coolidge’s numerous collections of poetry include This Time We Are Both (2010); Sound as Thought (1990), which was chosen for the New American Poetry Series; Own Face(1978); and Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric (1966). His work is included in An Anthology of New York Poets (1970) and The Young American Poets (1968). A contributing editor for Sulfur, Coolidge lives in Petaluma, California.
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 the upcoming album Flukum. He recently 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 in Mexico City. He has been involved in the recording studio and workshops at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University since 2009.
BRAHJA WALDMAN has performed with the likes of Patti Smith, Thurston Moore, Lydia Lunch, Daniel Carter, and Sam Shalabi. He is a member of Heroes Are Gang Leaders—a group founded by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis. He has accompanied his aunt, poet Anne Waldman, since the age of ten. Growing up, Waldman’s music sensei was luminary pianist Paul Bley. Waldman is co-director of Fast Speaking Music, a poetry and music label in NYC.
