Joel Harrison and Anthony Pirog: Guitars Stephan Crump: bass Allison Miller: drums
About "The Great Mirage"
Pirog and Harrison tend to finish each other sentences when they play. Twenty five years separate them in age, and yet they seem to have common ancestry. Both are from Wash. D.C., both love jazz, rock, fusion, avant garde, folk, funk, and country music, and both often do all of it all at once. A previous encounter took place in the now defunct 3 guitar group The Spellcasters (Cuneiform Records/ 2018.) Now the two plectrists have conjured a true collaboration.
On The Great Mirage each composed and arranged music for the session, the music caterwauls between heavy and light, really loud and really soft, gorgeous, spiky, grooving and free. The record is a bit of a 21st century essay in what the guitar can do. The band’s sense of joy and adventure is palpable as they extend their range and reach deep into American guitar history and future.
The rhythm section adds a tremendous amount to the pieces. Allison Miller, herself a D.C. kid, wallops and caresses the drums with authority and finesse. Crump, who is better known for his upright playing, grooves like a modern day Jamerson, and then puts a bow around a heart breaking series of modern jazz chord changes.
The session is full of pathos, Harrison’s “There’s Never Enough Time” and “I’ll See You in the Shining World.” But then moments of thunder, Pirog’s “It Slipped Through My Fingers, his arrangement of Keith Jarret’s “Mortgage on My Soul.” There’s the windswept ballad “Desert Solitaire,” and the final track where two Les Pauls light up a Neil Young-style groove penned by Harrison called “Buffalo Heart.” The CD takes its name from the first tune, The Great Mirage, a Paul Motian-inspired number which Harrison wrote in a flash after reading a book on Tibetan Dream Yoga.
For guitar fans, modern jazz lovers, and rockers alike, this release takes you on a circuitous, thrilling journey. |
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About Joel Harrison
Guitarist, composer, arranger, lyricist, writer, educator, and vocalist Joel Harrison has “created a new blueprint for jazz” (New Orleans Times-Picayune). A Guggenheim Fellow (2010) whose compositions have been commissioned by Chamber Music America, Meet the Composer, New Music USA, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, and the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, Harrison is a two-time winner of the Jazz Composers Alliance Composition Competition and has appeared repeatedly on DownBeat Magazine’s “Rising Star” poll.
His twenty-two releases as a leader showcase his prowess as a shapeshifting composer, with works for orchestra, string quartet, solo cello, and percussion as well as the PASIC award-winning marimba solo Fear of Silence. Notable releases include Free Country, featuring Norah Jones and David Binney; the recent America at War for jazz orchestra; String Choir: The Music of Paul Motian; and Search, featuring Donny McCaslin. His ever-surprising body of work seamlessly connects multiple American traditions. Harrison’s music may be founded on jazz but veers into classical, rock, country, and all manner of American roots music. Succinctly described by the New York Times as “protean… brilliant,” he is also an active film composer, having worked on the Oscar-nominated Traffic Stop and the Sundance awardee Southern Comfort.
A former student of Jimmy Wyble and Mick Goodrick, Harrison is the founder and director of the Alternative Guitar Summit, a yearly festival devoted to new and unusual guitar music. The festival has featured such artists as Fred Frith, Nels Cline, Bill Frisell, Julian Lage, and Pat Metheny, who has called the Summit “one of the most interesting and distinguished forums for guitar on the planet.” |
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About Anthony Pirog
Washington, D.C.-based guitarist Anthony Pirog is a musician who knows no stylistic limits. Educated in jazz but enthusiastically embracing diverse forms from indie/punk-informed rock to ambient experimentation, Pirog has emerged as one of the most noteworthy artists on the 21st century D.C. area music scene, defying predictability with live appearances in myriad configurations, from solo experimental sets to his genre-defying duo with cellist (and life partner) Janel Leppin, the hard-charging instrumental rock quartet New Electric, and his avant jazz trio with bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Ches Smith. Pirog even led a performance of Terry Riley's landmark minimalist composition "In C," featuring an ensemble of 22 musicians, at D.C.'s Sonic Circuits experimental music festival in 2011. It's safe to say that no one knows precisely what to expect from Pirog, and that fact alone might make him noteworthy, but it's also helpful that he employs technology with uncommon intelligence, is guided by a surefooted artistic conception in each of his projects, and happens to possess killer chops.
Pirog was born in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, with childhood years spent in Maryland and California before his family moved to Vienna, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., when he was nine years old. Anthony's father -- a former electric guitarist in a surf-style band -- played a key role in his son's burgeoning musical interest; the younger Pirog enjoyed listening to his father's record collection (from Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson to doo wop and, of course, surf), and first began learning guitar (starting at the age of 11 with Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman") on a 1963 Fender Jaguar that his father decided to give to him. During the 1990s, Pirog attended the same high school as Janel Leppin -- although they wouldn't begin performing together as a duo until 2005 -- and played in myriad bands, his interests moving inexorably toward avant jazz and experimental music. |
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About AGS Recordings
Building on more than a decade’s experience advocating bold new approaches to the guitar, the world’s premier festival of visionary, boundary-pushing guitar music – the NY-based Alternative Guitar Summit www.alternativeguitarsummit.com – is excited to announce the first release of 2023 with the Stardust Reunion Band. AGS Recordings is the brainchild of AGS director and founder Joel Harrison and frequent AGS performer Anthony Pirog. Pirog and Harrison, kindred spirits in their musical background and approach, envision the label as a showcase for the multiplicity of visionary guitar music currently being made worldwide. The new label enables the Alternative Guitar Summit (AGS) to expand its advocacy for creative guitar music to new audiences, beyond the already-impressive reach of AGS’ multi-faceted music festival and guitar camps/workshops, ongoing since 2010. |
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