#jean cook

[peterhutchins]

Beauty Pill - Basla Andolsun, Chad Clark, Jean Cook, Drew Doucette, Abram Goodrich & Devin Ocampo @ Luce Foundation Center for American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), Washington, DC, on Friday, May 20, 2016

Beauty Pill Symphonette. An experimental, intimate performance with the band expanded to a larger ensemble with horns.

[asianamsmakingmusic]

Jean Cook is a musician, producer and Director of Programs for Future of Music Coalition. She is a founder and director of Anti Social Music, a New York-based new music collective. She currently records and tours with Ida/Elizabeth Mitchell, Jon Langford, and Beauty Pill. She has recorded on over 50 albums; recent appearances include projects by New York avant jazz artists William Parker, Tom Abbs/Frequency Response, Assif Tsahar/KJLA 4Tet, and Taylor Ho Bynum/Spidermonkey Strings. Jean’s administrative background includes working as a publicist and curator for Washington Performing Arts Society, producing and hosting radio programs for 89.9 WKCR-FM, New York, and producing dozens of new music performance projects. In 2004 Jean worked for Air Traffic Control, a political action group helping musicians to be more effective in the 2004 election cycle. For FMC, she covers a wide range of issues including jazz and classical music metadata, jazz radio playlist composition and (and how to improve data collection), and understanding how copyright impacts indigenous artists in places like Ethiopia, Tajikistan and Australia. For the last two years, Jean co-directed FMC's Artist Revenue Streams project, a groundbreaking initiative offering data-driven insight into US-based musician income and how it correlates with genre, career arc, roles played, tech savviness, radio airplay, and other critical factors (more info here). She is a member of New Music USA's New Media Council and also currently serves as Chair of APAP's Classical Connections Committee.

[peterhutchins]

Beauty Pill - Chad Clark, Jean Cook, Drew Doucette, Basla Andolsun & Devin Ocampo @ Black Cat, Washington, DC, on Friday, September 4, 2015.

Summer 2015 Tour Setlist:

Lifeguard in Wintertime Jury In The World ‘Gon Convict You, Baby Drapetomania! Ann the Word Won't You Be Mine The Western Prayer Afrikaner Barista The Cigarette Girl from the Future Steven and Tiwonge Near Miss Stories Tight Frame/Loose Frame (Smart Went Crazy Cover) Exit Without Saving Bone White Crown Victoria

[peterhutchins]

Beauty Pill - Chad Clark, Jean Cook, Drew Doucette, Basla Andolsun & Devin Ocampo @ Artisphere, Arlington, Va on Thursday April, 30, 2015.

Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are Spring Tour Setlist:

Jury In The World ‘Gon Convict You, Baby Lifeguard in Wintertime Drapetomania! Ann the Word The Cigarette Girl from the Future Afrikaner Barista Rideshare Steven and Tiwonge The Western Prayer Hidden Track For Pretend Near Miss Stories Exit Without Saving Won't You Be Mine Tight Frame/Loose Frame (Smart Went Crazy Cover) The Idiot Heart Bone White Crown Victoria

[dustedmagazine]

Tara Jane O’Neil — Where Shine New Lights (Kranky)

Not that you’d know it from listening. If most performances seem effortless coming from a stereo, O’Neil’s latest sounds inevitable, as natural and as spectacular as a sunrise. Five years gave her time to carve the excess from her songs and instill them with a fragile, suite-like continuity. They range from cloudy, barely-there instrumentals to pop songs painted in shades of white and shimmering yellow. One minute we hear a lilting voice and a sweetly plucked melody — at times accompanied by vibraphone, piano or violin, in one case by drums alone — the next we hear only a whispered tone held on a wire thin string, like a wisp of smoke drifting through the air. We’re carried away by it, sometimes into near shapeless abstraction, until the weight of the next song restores gravity and brings us back to earth. It’s as if the entire trip proceeded according to the laws of physics, not the whim of a songwriter.

That nine total musicians (counting TJO) could deliver such an unlabored album when it took half a decade to produce doesn’t necessarily break believability, except many of them never even stepped into the same room together. The five studios on the New Lights itinerary cover five different cities in three different parts of the country: California and Oregon, downtown and upstate New York, and Kentucky. Of its 12 songs, only one is truly solo O’Neil, and only one, a brief and richly colored instrumental, features more than three additional players. The majority of the songs utilize an ensemble of just two or three, but from the beginning to the end of the album not one of those ensembles repeats, not even once.

So where does that sense of ease come from? 

It helps that the supporting cast is filled with talented musicians who know pop and rock music just as well as they know the improvised stuff. O’Neil has told interviewers in the past that she likes to work on her toes, and it’s reasonable to assume she asked her collaborators to make something up on the spot, without even a single rehearsal under their belt. Tim Barnes picks up the sticks and mallets on three songs here, just as he has done for the likes of Jim O’Rourke, Tetuzi Akiyama, and the Silver Jews. Corey Fogel, former member of The Mae Shi and Julia Holter’s percussionist for Loud City Song, adds his talents to a pair of tunes.

Three-quarters of the Ida core drop in too. Jean Cook alone has played with Evan Parker, Cecil Taylor, and Anthony Braxton. Here she adds “strings” and her voice to the mix; Dan Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell play guitar, sing, and strike the pearly keys, and Ida Pearle pops in for two understated violin contributions. Anna Huff and, oddly, Wilder Zoby were called to the plate as well. It’s a dream band to have behind you, even if you can only have a few of them around at a time.

The other key resides, of course, in the strength of Tara Jane’s songs. They’re skeletal, bittersweet and exquisitely quiet — open enough to make the most of what her cohorts could offer, firm enough to have a semi-personal punch. When, during “Elemental Finding,” she sings, “We start alone and we go alone and sometimes together we shine,” it’s hard not to think of the dedication she gives in the liner notes. It’s a small list that begins with “in loving memory,” includes two former band mates and ends with a name that might be her father’s.

Yet the music is not dominated by grief. It’s too playful for that, a little too bright even when it sounds sad. Many of the lyrics are rubbed into a chalky blur anyway. They bubble to the surface only to evaporate in a steamy plume of half-heard vowels. If something private exists there, the grooves of the record hide it just as well as they hide everything else.

Lucas Schleicher