Ghost Train Orchestra

Home , Ghost Train Orchestra, John Kirby (musician), Raymond Scott

Liz Linder

Brian Carpenter Trumpets, Harmonica, Voice Andy Laster Alto Saxophone, Flute Dennis Lichtman Clarinet Petr Cancura Tenor Saxophone, Clarinet Mazz Swift Violin, Voice Emily Bookwalter Viola Curtis Hasselbring Trombone Ron Caswell Tuba Avi Bortnick Guitar Michael Bates Double Bass Rob Garcia Drums

PROGRAM There will be an intermission.

Saturday, April 12 at 7 PM

Harold Prince Theatre

The Annenberg Center's Jazz Series is funded in part by the Brownstein Jazz Fund and the Philadelphia Fund For Jazz Legacy & Innovation of The Philadelphia Foundation and Philadelphia Jazz Project: a project of the Painted Bride Art Center.

Media support for the 13/14 Jazz Series provided by WRTI and City Paper.

13/14 Season | 31 ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ghost Train Orchestra’s second album, Book of Rhapsodies, follows their highly-acclaimed debut Hothouse Stomp (2011). In this adventurous installment, Ghost Train Orchestra moves ten years ahead from their first album to perform Brian Carpenter’s modernistic reimagined arrangements of four unusual ensembles from the late 1930s: The Alec Wilder Octet, The John Kirby Sextet, The Raymond Scott Quintette and Reginald Foresythe and His New Music. Produced by Grammy® award winner Danny Blume and featuring Carpenter’s surreal arrangements for a 12-member orchestra plus choir, Book of Rhapsodies delivers the rich experience of transporting the listener to the past and using that past to transform the future. Decades before Gunther Schuller coined the term Third Stream to describe a genre straddling the line between jazz and classical music, New York became the epicenter of a new movement of composers whose work seemed to exist outside the margins. In the late 1930s, a small cadre of forward-thinking composers began creating small ensembles with unorthodox instrumentation to realize some of the strangest and most evocative music of the period. With Book of Rhapsodies, Ghost Train Orchestra performs Brian Carpenter’s new arrangements by four such seminal ensembles from that period. The Ghost Train Orchestra’s debut album Hothouse Stomp was listed on several 2011 top ten lists including NPR, New York Jazz Record, Boston Globe, JazzTimes, The Sound Room and Stereophile Magazine. Brian Carpenter was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and the album reached the top 10 of the Billboard® Jazz charts in the weeks following. Downbeat Magazine raved “Carpenter and his little big band don’t just recreate musical museum pieces; they breathe fire and life into this amazing music…the only thing better than hearing this recording would be seeing the band live.” The band has performed at the Museum of Modern Art, the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The Ghost Train Orchestra was formed in 2006 after Brian Carpenter was selected as the musical director for an event marking the 90th anniversary of the historic Regent Theater in Arlington, MA. Since then, the band has performed regularly in New York City, home of all of its members except the leader, a Boston resident. Book of Rhapsodies was recorded at Brooklyn Recording Studio after a string of monthly shows at Brooklyn’s colorful Jalopy Theater. Carpenter rearranged the music for orchestra, adding strings, low brass, guitar and a six-member choir featuring Tomas Cruz and Joe Chappel of the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera Einstein on the Beach. Acclaimed artist Noah Woods created the cover and booklet artwork inspired by the strange and descriptive song titles of the original composers. In 2001, Carpenter moved to Boston to direct a film documentary on the life and legacy of Albert Ayler. He then founded the sprawling Boston-based band Beat Circus and created an acclaimed “Weird American Gothic” trilogy of dark Americana albums. He also leads Brian Carpenter & the Confessions, whose music is primarily song-oriented, with Carpenter as lead singer and lyricist. He was recently commissioned by the Berkeley Repertory Theater in California as composer and lyricist for the true crime musical The Barbary Coast. In addition, he produces radio programs on WZBC-FM at Boston College, including recent documentaries on Sam Rivers, Raymond Scott and film sound design.

32 | The Ghost Train Orchestra features an outstanding roster of talent: alto saxophonist Andy Laster (Ballin’ The Jack, Satoko Fujii), clarinetist Dennis Lichtman (Brain Cloud, Nation Beat), tenor saxophonist Petr Cancura (Joe Morris), trombonist Curtis Hasselbring (Ballin’ the Jack), tubist Ron Caswell (Slavic Soul Party), violinist Mazz Swift (Burnt Sugar), guitarist Avi Bortnick (John Scofield), bassist Michael Bates and drummer Rob Garcia (Joseph Jarman, Vince Giordano).

13/14 Season | 33