Piano and guitar improvisations from Michael Snow and Alan Licht. Lampo is thrilled to bring them together for what is only the duo’s second performance.

Michael Snow (b.1928, Toronto) is a Canadian artist whose multidisciplinary oeuvre includes painting, sculpture, video, film, sound, photography, drawing, writing, and music. Starting as a professional jazz pianist in the 50s, he has continued to pursue music as a free improviser. His 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Control documents his growing involvement with the burgeoning free jazz movement, and the soundtrack boasts a lineup that includes Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and Sonny Murray. Snow has performed with Evan Parker, Roswell Rudd, Derek Bailey and Tony Conrad, and he is a founding member of the CCMC (Snow, Paul Dutton and John Oswald) and playing frequent solo concerts. His art explores the nature of perception, consciousness, language, and temporality and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Hara Museum of Art (Tokyo), the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Palais des Beaux Arts (Brussels). Snow’s key works include experimental films such as Wavelength (1967), Back and Forth (1969), and La Région Centrale (1971), as well as the large-scale public sculptures Flightstop (1979) and The Audience (1988-89). Snow has received several awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship (1972), the Order of Canada in (1982), and the Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres, France (1995). He lives in Toronto.

Guitarist and author Alan Licht (b.1968, N.J.) is active in New York’s rock and experimental music scenes as a composer, improviser, curator and lecturer, while also engaging in performances and installations that intersect with his interests in film and art. Since the early 1990s he has focused on pursuing free improvisation (with Rudolph Grey’s group the Blue Humans and guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors) as well as indie rock (the bands Love Child and Run On, as well as a brief stint with legendary 60s psychedelic rock band Arthur Lee & Love). Over this period Licht also began developing a repertoire of structured improvisation pieces for solo electric guitar, documented on a series of albums starting with 1994’s Sink the Aging Process. These brought together his interests in reharmonization (from jazz and classical music), process, repetition, and extended duration (from Minimalism), and the textural vocabularies of rock and noise music. The albums also include tape pieces and organ works.

Support provided by Consulate General of Canada