Tom Teasley Launches Summer Concert Series
If you’ve ever heard Tom Teasley perform, you definitely remember it. This Hollin Hills percussionist is one of the most imaginative and wildly inventive musicians on the planet — a virtuoso on dozens of instruments who has toured the world almost non-stop for the last few decades, collaborating with an international Who’s Who of musicians and acting as a “cultural ambassador” for the US State Department. Few musicians have explored so imaginatively the ways music connects us across cultural divides — but Teasley’s music is not a mere pastiche of styles, or a bland “world music” stew. With a background in jazz, he’s absorbed a global range of styles — post-bop jazz, klezmer, Indian ragas, you name it — and made them his own, resulting in deeply personal music that is as exciting as it is beautiful.
Teasley is taking a break from globetrotting this summer to present a ten-concert series around Alexandria to showcase some of his new work — and it looks to be a musical feast. Some of the most intriguing concerts will be based on the improvisational “art of the duo” series he’s been developing with a range of other top-end musicians, including jazz trumpeter Dave Ballou, the Chinese hammered dulcimer player Chao Tian, and the Indian bansuri player John Wubbenhorst.
(The complete schedule is on Teasley’s website, and you can hear much more of his music on his Youtube channel.)
The series’ opening concert, a duo with trumpeter Dave Ballou, takes place at the Atheneum on Thursday evening, and promises to be a very personal, almost intimate “conversation” between these two deeply accomplished players. They’ve known each other for some time — Ballou is a highly-regarded jazz trumpeter who’s recorded with Steely Dan, among others — and earlier this year the two released “Lunch Break”, a gorgeous, spontaneous session recorded in Teasley’s studio on the spur of the moment.
“Dave and I had played together on some other projects,” says Teasley, “and he’s a very open guy. I was working on a video and I said, ‘man, I'm going to take a break, why don't you just come over and we'll play for an hour and just see what we get?’ And that’s what we did. It was totally improvised.”
For all its offhand birth, the resulting performance is drop-dead beautiful, and has been hailed as “a mesmerizing conversation between rhythm and tone” by All About Jazz and “a masterclass in intuitive improvisation” by Jazz Weekly. Teasley did some overdubbing afterwards to give it what he calls “compositional context,” and the recording was edited lightly for concision. But the result is a fascinating glimpse into how musicians “play” in the best sense of the word, exchanging ideas in an uninhibited, completely spontaneous way. Ballou’s song-like tone sometimes soars, sometimes floats, sometimes darts in and out of the orchestral landscape of sounds that Teasley conjures out of his instruments, and the eleven tracks range from the exotic and atmospheric “Tips in Baghdad”, to the poignant “When the Wind Cries,” to the electrifying “Rush Hour.” And it’s all magical.
“A successful improvisation is far less about playing, and far more about listening,” says Teasley. “And all of these duo projects are going to be improvisational, and all with people that I have worked with before. We know how to listen to each other.”
The summer series also includes a concert with the Jeff Cosgrove Quintet, four performances of “Drumming Through Culture and Time”, a yoga collaboration and more. For more information on tickets and times, check out Teasley’s website.
Oh, and stay tuned: Teasley is planning a Hollin Hills concert for the fall, which will no doubt be one of the community events of the year.