@ Outpost Performance Space
210 Yale SE • Albuquerque NM
https://tickets.holdmyticket.com/tickets/408823
Dino's Safe Haven Concert Series: Chacon/Nakatani/Santistevan Trio
April 6, 2023 • 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm
DOORS 6:30pm • ALL AGES
Comprising three of New Mexico’s finest and most diverse improvising musicians and composers – Raven Chacon, Tatsuya Nakatani, and Carlos Santistevan, this trio creates, as they describe it, “improvisational music of urgency and deep resonance.” The trio was formed during the pandemic when Baltimore’s High Zero Festival asked curators around the country to assemble improvisers in their regions for a streaming edition of the festival. Santa Fe bassist Carlos Santistevan invited percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, and guitarist/composer Raven Chacon to play with him, and they recorded their first official session together in Santa Fe’s San Miguel Chapel—the oldest chapel in the United States. They planned to release it but the hard drive containing the files was stolen from Santistevan’s car before a proper backup could be made. The trio quickly made plans to hold another recording session at the San Miguel Chapel and recently released the LP entitled, Inhale/Exhale on Other Minds Records. The trio’s unique sound is created by their unique experiences in a myriad of other musical fields, including Nakatani’s time playing avant-country with Eugene Chadbourne and in his Nakatani Gong Orchestra project, Santistevan’s deep roots in the “aesthetically untethered experimental music of Northern New Mexico, and Chacon’s forays in metal and noise groups. Also a celebrated composer, Chacon, who grew up in the Navajo Nation, became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022 which he received for his composition, “Voiceless Mass.” As they describe it, “Nakatani’s frenetic percussion provides a foundation for the buzzsaw swarm of stringed instruments from Chacon and Santistevan. Throughout the two improvisations, beats and crashes map the space, the adobe walls offering a muted and earthen resonance.” Vital Weekly wrote of the album, “Organic naturality imbues the deeply engaging and utterly compelling work with a hint of earthiness, of being firmly rooted: past fleeting moments of here and now. A timelessness strangely at odds with the improvised nature of proceedings and magically merging in addition to that at the very same moment.”
Dino’s Safe Haven Concert Series was created when, upon his passing in July 2021, renowned sound designer and composer-improviser and long-time New Mexico resident, J.A. Deane (“Dino”), bequeathed a generous gift of his “Safe Haven Tiny Home” to Outpost to support the work of like-minded artists. In August 2022, the first event in the series featured a performance by Theater Grottesco, with whom Dino collaborated for 25 years.
