Performers

Burnt Sugar (New York)

Burnt Sugar is the brainchild of critic and Village Voice staff writer, Greg Tate, the group’s conductor and musical director. With personnel numbering in the teens and covering innumerable stylistic bases, Burnt Sugar blasts through the gamut of contemporary musical genres with Tate marshalling their exceptional talents with Butch Morris’s “conduction” technique, a system of hand cues that signal different kinds of improvisation.

As Tate tells it, “Burnt Sugar, the Arkestra Chamber began as a grand and noble idea that begat an ostensibly foolhardy enterprise, an updated Miles Davis Bitches Brew for the 23rd century with players who were conversant in a plethora of post-modern musical tongues. What it has become is one of the few modern music groups to freely mash-up any and all forms of vocal and instrumental music like it ain’t nobody’s business if they do.

“Burnt Sugar’s got the nerve to claim Morton Feldman, Brian Eno and Steve Reich as progenitors alongside Billie Holiday, Jimi Hendrix and Vladislav Delay. Their player-ranks have been known to include devotees of Steve Lacy and Steve Coleman, Irish fiddlers, AACM refugees, Afropunk rockers, staunch beboppers, feminist hiphoppers, doowoppers, funkateers and rodeo stars of the digital divide.”

Website:

www.burntsugarindex.com