Ty Citerman's Press Kit Here
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Eli Koppel, 2013 Ty Citerman www.tyciterman.com praise for the 2014 Tzadik Records release “Bop Kabbalah:” “…one of the year’s most arresting recordings…wailing with enough majesty to bring down the walls of Jericho.” -Matt R. Lohr, Jazztimes “[Four Stars] At its core, the record serves as Citerman’s vision of Jewish-themed music filtered through an improvisational lens. Traditional klezmer and nigunim strains mix-and-match with rock, swing and modalism, creating snazzy hybrids…that snoop, spy and survey with one eye toward the serious and the other toward make-believe.” -Bob Gendron, Downbeat "...Bop Kabbalah effortlessly thumps its way through whimsical compositions with deep and expressive lyricism." -Brad Cohan, The New York City Jazz Record “[Four Stars] Imagine if the clouds made a sound other than thunder when they clashed…When this band is not sounding like the actual storm, it carries all the foreboding of the build-up to one.” -John Shand, The Sydney Morning Herald “…’What is Jewish music? What is its future?...’ The most recent musical mind to address these questions and puzzles is the inventive guitarist and composer Ty Citerman…On Bop Kabbalah, Citerman…has surrounded himself with able partners to execute his vision [with] palpable originality.” -Samuel Weinberg, Search and Restore “Composer and guitarist Ty Citerman explores the connections between nigunim (improvisational Hasidic melodies), punk rock and free jazz with his group Bop Kabbalah. The quartet plays…engrossing, cerebral tunes…” -Michael Harrington, The Philadelphia Inquirer “…steeped in various genres that overlap to become a unique landscape, leaving plenty of space for humor and irreverence, if not iconoclasm.” -Alain Drouot, jazzColours [translated from the original Italian] “The range of Citerman’s influences are on full display…Klezmer and nigunim blend with jazz and rock strains to create thoughtful, layered compositions…” -Greg Salisbury, Jewish Exponent “…Ty Citerman delves deep into his Jewish roots in this brilliant new project for the Tzadik Jewish series. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as the Beat Generation, medieval Eastern European and Asian music modes and the rich depths of Kabbalistic mysticism, Ty has fashioned an intense and colorful program of modernist music that blends klezmer, nigunim, jazz, rock, classical and more. [His] most ambitious and powerful project to date is also his most personal and heartfelt.” -John Zorn Brooklyn-based guitarist, composer and bandleader Ty Citerman began his professional career at a young age, playing in local clubs with jazz and rock bands as a teenager in his native St. Louis. He moved to New York City to attend Columbia University in 1992 and quickly planted himself in the NYC music scene. Since then, he has spent more than twenty years exploring a broad aesthetic landscape of modern jazz, new music, rock and free improvisation. His newest project is Bop Kabbalah, a quartet of electric guitar, trumpet, bass clarinet and drums that was commissioned to record for John Zorn’s “Radical Jewish Culture” series on Tzadik Records. Released in May 2014, the CD received four star reviews in Downbeat and The Sydney Morning Herald, and was hailed in Jazztimes, The New York City Jazz Record, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Jewish Exponent and jazzColous (Italy), among others. The band showcases Ty’s guitar work and his unique compositional voice: in this case, he also reveals a flair for rendering catchy and propulsive instrumental Jewish music. He is a founding member and composer for the internationally-acclaimed 15 year-old jazz collective Gutbucket, which has toured internationally to 20 countries and 33 U.S. states and released five CDs/LPs on Cuneiform Records, Cantaloupe Music, Enja, Knitting Factory and NRW. JazzTimes called his composition “Murakami” from “Flock” (2011) “…one of the band’s finest compositions to date…a track that finds the quartet painting in bold, dark strokes of color with moments of glistening light…” Citerman’s 2005 composition “Punkass Rumbledink” was featured at the Bang on a Can Marathon, and The Guardian (UK) wrote that “Throsp%” (2005) “…boasts a hypnotically creeping guitar riff and an atmosphere of sustained menace [which] is not standard jazz territory.” The band’s forthcoming 2015 CD for Cuneiform was recorded in 2014 during a weeklong residency at the Stone in New York City and will feature Citerman’s pieces “Bounce! Clap! Shasta!” and “So Many So Little.” He is a member of the nimble electric guitar group Collapse Quartet with Yoshie Fruchter, Jonathan Goldberger and Eyal Maoz. Following in the footsteps of the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, the music explores the whimsical and rock-tinged periphery of jazz. Each guitarist in the collective composes music that provides ample room for improvisation, all while exploring the electric guitar’s sonic landscape of possibilities with multiple effects pedals, loops and guitar preparations. Ty is also an agile freelance guitarist and improviser: he’s performed with Gutbucket and the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall; he’s played with John Zorn, Ikue Mori, Anthony Coleman and Cyro Baptista at the Stone; he’s played guitar in massive ensembles fronted by Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca; he has a long-running free improvisation duo with flutist/fue player Kaoru Watanabe; he’s written for and performed with the irreverent composer collective Anti- Social Music; and he’s collaborated with the string quartets Ethel and the JACK Quartet. As a composer, Ty was commissioned by the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC in 2012 for a special performance entitled “Tibet in Comics,” for which he collaborated on a score for projections of the beautiful graphic novel The Magic Life of Milarepa. His string quartet version of the Gutbucket piece “Another World Is Possible” (2002) was revitalized by JACK Quartet in 2014; and his 2014 piece “Shreds. (for Michael Brown)” for piano, double bass and drumset was premiered by ace new music trio Bearthoven in 2014. Ty has written for dance and film as well, including a portion of Gutbucket’s live score to the classic 1950 French animation “Jeannot L’Intrepide.” The Gutbucket-Ethel octet premiered his chamber piece “More More Bigger Better Faster With Cheese” at Jazz Saalfelden in the summer of 2006 to a standing room only crowd. His music has been featured on National Public Radio (“Soundcheck,” “World Café Live”), Radio Free Europe, and numerous college and independent stations across the US, UK, Canada, Australia and Europe. He’s performed extensively at major jazz festivals in the U.S. and Europe, including the London Jazz Festival, Paris Jazz Festival, Belgrade Jazz Festival, Jazz A Vienne, the Earshot Jazz Festival, Jazz Saalfelden, Worldport Jazz Festival, San Sebastian Jazz Festival, Rotterdam Jazz, Copenhagen Jazz Festival, and Warsaw Summer Jazz Days, among others. Ty has a bustling private teaching studio and also teaches classes on Jewish music for young people at the Village Temple, the Jewish Community Project (JCP) and Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST) in New York City. He has been invited as a guest artist to teach programs on composition, arrangement and improvisation at the Eastman School of Music, California Institute of the Arts, University of Minnesota, University of Missouri, Dartmouth College, and the Bang on a Can Summer Music Institute. And when he’s not busy with all of this, he’s working towards a master’s degree in music composition at Brooklyn College, studying with Jason Eckardt. He endorses Tom Anderson Guitars, Pedaltrain pedal boards, Reunion Blues gig bags and Sibelius software. LEARN 1 -BLOWING JEFF GUITAR PLAYER AUGUST 2006 HI "THE TITLE OF SLUDGE TEST [CANTALOUPE] Akai E2 Headrush pedal I use to do real- I remember working out a solo for one of was inspired by a high school science lab," time overdubs. You can hear it on the our early songs called "Tango Abstractions" says Gutbucket's Ty Citerman about his 7/4 groove at the end of "Punkass that had alternating measures of 6/4 and band's new CD. "You were given a Petri dish Rumbledink," where I layered four differ- 7/4. But now, I've internalized playing in filled with what the teacher called sludge, ent parts, one at a time. As for "prepared five, seven, and nine, so I can use my ears and the test was determining what your guitar," I copped that idea from Fred Frith. and intuition-instead of just my intellect- sludge was comprised of." It involves using "found objects" to get to approach songs in those meters. Performing my own sludge test on the sounds that can't be achieved with a typi- What inspired you to cover Olivier Messiaen's New York quartet's kinetic punk jazz opuses cal rig. My ES-335 has a trapeze tailpiece, "Danse de la Fureur, pour les Sept Trumpeters"? reveals an explosive concoction containing so I'll stick stuff like tuning forks or metal It's the only section from his Quartuor lethal doses of Ornette Coleman, King Crim- scraps in the strings behind the bridge. For pour les Fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of son, John Zorn, Black Sabbath, Stravinsky, the slide solo on "Money Management for Time), an eight-part suite written in 1941 and Fugazi. a Better Life," I wove a screwdriver between while he was in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, "We've got pretty eclectic influences," the strings. where the instruments play in unison. It was acknowledges Citerman, "and I think that Your music sometimes sounds chaotic, but I sus- originally scored for clarinet, violin, cello, actually puts us more in the jazz tradition pect most of it is meticulously arranged end com- and piano because that's what was available than if we played straight-ahead bop.