At Home In all places and Nowhere, Thollem Fuels Creative imagination with Infinite Vacation
The Astral Traveling Sessions doc performances with 55 improvising musicians from Greece, Italy, Canada and during the United States, together with likewise multifaceted New York bassist William Parker, Baltimore pedal steel renegade Susan Alcorn and San Jose saxophone visionary Hafez Modirzadeh.
“He’s acknowledged as a little bit of a nomadic type that has a voice of his own but can also adapt to practically any situation,” Cross suggests. When Thollem sent him a listing of a dozen or so jobs, Cross thought that an considerable series of releases would “truly seize the breadth and range in Thollem’s perform,” he claims.
Bay Region audiences can get a taste of Thollem’s songs in the coming months. He performs a solo live performance at the Again Place in Berkeley Aug. 25 and duo with drummer André Custodio at Bird & Beckett Publications & Data in San Francisco on Aug. 28. Thollem and photographer/videographer Angela C. Villa (a.k.a. ACVilla), his lifestyle and creative lover considering the fact that the mid-1990s, premiere the multimedia output “Worlds In A Existence” Aug. 29 at the general performance place Is effective/San José, an party that will be livestreamed.
He also provides a livestream solo piano live performance and lecture Sept. 3 at San Francisco State College focusing on “the socio-political heritage and significance of the piano.” Later on he and Villa head out on a cross country tour by way of train that will hold them on the rails through Oct. 3, touring with a keyboard that he can transportation in a backpack.
Thollem began checking out electric keyboards about 6 a long time back when his significantly-flung travels brought him to conditions in which even a regrettably neglected piano was not available. “Piano concert events are my bread and butter, and I’m not picky at all,” he claims. “I’ve played disastrous pianos, which I enjoy. They have their very own intonation, quirks and appears. At times they chunk again. I’m extensive open up in that regard.”
The instrument has always loomed massive in Thollem’s lifestyle. His mother was a piano teacher when he was developing up on the Peninsula, and he took to the ivories early, immersing himself in the European classical repertoire though also frequently attending jazz concerts at Santa Cruz’s Kuumbwa Jazz Center. By the mid-1980s he was learning piano performance and composition at San Jose Condition, a time when the university boasted the region’s most creatively unfettered tunes plan outdoors of Mills Faculty. Actively playing gamelan with composer Lou Harrison and researching with Hafez Modirzadeh and Royal Hartigan radically expanded his musical horizons.
But dismayed by the advent of the to start with Persian Gulf War, “I dropped out of almost everything and spent 3 yrs dwelling out of a backpack, protesting,” Thollem says. “It took me a long time to determine out how to reintegrate again into culture. The last 15 decades have felt very effective.”
He taught piano himself and worked as an accompanist for quite a few years whilst building his possess compositions and an idiosyncratic strategy to improvisation, but he did not start out documenting his new music until eventually 2005. That was the year he made his initial extended foray on the road as a musician, an knowledge he describes as “a whole catastrophe, wherever everything went mistaken but reduction of existence and limb.”
He doesn’t advocate trial and error as a touring method, but the connections he designed on the original 5-week cross state sojourn offered a basis. Right after numerous years of creating on those interactions, he gave up his apartment and stayed on the road, building “a meager dwelling without getting to compromise something,” he says.
In numerous methods his peripatetic way of living echoes his musical sensibility. At property almost everywhere and nowhere, he absorbs influences from collaborators and cultures he encounters, fitting sundry seems and textures into his vast matrix. Saxophonist Rent Romus, the founder and director of Edgetone Records, has watched Thollem’s evolution since releasing some of his earliest albums, starting with the 2005 duo session “Everything’s Likely Everywhere” with drummer Rick Rivera.
“From the exterior you’d practically feel the target was really wide, but if you sit with the songs you can listen to the popular themes coalesce no matter whether it is his vocal music, electronic new music or improvised piano new music,” Romus claims. “He had compositions in his early improvement that he utilized as launching points for improvisation. He carries his individual e-book in his thoughts and provides it out in different settings.”
“There are definite threads,” Villa agrees. “One of the most important types is a little something he talks about in workshops, which is ‘why not?’ You could say that is a person of the parts of his approach. ‘Why not do this? I’m heading to go for it.’”
No collaboration improved exemplifies the seamless continuum involving Thollem’s daily life and tunes than his partnership with Villa, who taught in community universities all-around the South Bay for lots of yrs in advance of she gave up her working day work and took to the street with him. In recent a long time she’s taken to documenting his performances and their travels as a photographer and videographer, visual aspects that she’s woven into multimedia general performance pieces like the new production they are introducing at Functions/San José.
Thollem, a moniker he developed from an anagram of his given identify, does not blame an unstable childhood for his rootless strategies. (“There’s no sob tale,” he says.) But the point he feels unmoored to relatives, occupation, and hometown has permitted him to thrive as a rolling stone gathering ever thicker levels of resourceful connections. He doesn’t reject creature comforts—he just places a quality on unconstrained motion.
“When I’m in motion, I sense my concepts are flowing,” he suggests. “It’s a great deal a lot easier to sleepwalk by means of life when you have a schedule. Items aren’t predictable and you have to be way far more on your toes, which is really significant to me as an artist. Touring provides me the chance to be influenced by other individuals and transmit electrical power, to see what functions and what doesn’t perform.”
