The Way of Rain
Thursday, March 31, 2005, 8pm
Contemporary Crafts Museum & Gallery
3934 SW Corbett Avenue
Portland, OR 97239
Phone: 503-223-2654
Fax: 503-223-0190
Email: info@contemporarycrafts.org
www.contemporarycrafts.org
admission is $10 for the general public
$7 for CCMG members, students and artists/musicians
This spring's SoundCraft performance series at the Contemporary
Crafts Museum and Gallery in Portland, OR opens on March 31st at 8pm
with a spoken word and music event.
Portland poet Larry Beckett has produced a beautiful, startling,
modern rendition of the Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu, which he has titled
"The Way of Rain". Larry will read the entire text, with musical
responses and illustration by Joel Taylor, on bamboo and cane flutes
(shakuhachi, hochiku, chinese fipple flute, and suling) and an
assortment of exotic percussion instruments.
Please join us for what promises to be an unusual and inspiring
literary and musical event.
_______________________________________________________
Larry Beckett's poetry ranges from brief lyrics and songs to blank
sonnets and 100-page narrative works. Out of the traditions of the
language, he invents bold forms appropriate to his subjects. His long
poems are part of a sequence in progress called American Cycle,
inspired by our folklore and past. Its styles are deeply connected to
American speech, whether it's the rough colloquialisms of Paul
Bunyan, the bare oratory of Chief Joseph, the circus ballyhoo of P.
T. Barnum, the aviation jargon of Amelia Earhart, the backwoods
dialect of Blue Ridge; old California is next. The Cycle's themes are
local mythology, history, memory, accomplishment, time, love. His
sonnets and madrigals center on marriage in our time; these poems
trace love day-to-day, with music and intensity. His translations of
the T'ang dynasty Chinese poet Li Po are rendered in contemporary
American images; those of Li Shang-yin are more private and
mysterious; The Way of Rain, guided by Chinese scholarship, tries to
reconstruct the lost order of the Tao Te Ching. He thinks of his
works as texts for performance, and they have been recorded. His
poetry was included in the anthology Portland Lights, and his book
Songs and Sonnets is available on Amazon.com.
Joel Taylor is a multi-instrumentalist and composer. He performs on
the shakuhachi, the Japanese end-blown bamboo flute, the Indonesian
fipple flute, the suling, and other world flutes, small percussion
and electronics. His work covers a wide spectrum of media,
including pieces for Javanese gamelan, orchestra, various mixed chamber
ensembles, tape music, electro-acoustic improvisation, and interactive
electronic music installations. Active in the improvised music and American
gamelan communities, he has performed and/or recorded with a wide
variety ofcreative musicians, including Curtis Bahn, Scott Smallwood,
Eve Beglarian,
Jin Hi Kim, Tom Dill, Lou Harrison, Chris Brown, Jim Altieri, Bryan Eubanks,
and others. He is a member of Gamelan Venerable Showers of Beauty,
the Lewis and Clark College Community Gamelan. He can be heard on
Wavelet
Records, available through CDBaby, or the Electronic Music
Foundation, or Shakuhachi.com.
-- Joel Taylor_____________________________________________
List subscription information is at: http://communication.ucsd.edu/shaku/listsub.html
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