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HARVEY: Good evening, everybody.
I'd like to welcome you to MIT.
My name's Mark Harvey, and I'm teaching here
in the music program.
And this semester we have a course
called Musical Improvisation.
And thanks to our music section as well as the alumni class
funds program, we were able to bring in some distinguished
improvisers.
We've had two of these, a series of four.
We've had two of these.
We have tonight, and then we have one more in early May.
Let me just say a couple words about our visitors
this evening.
We have Neil Leonard, who's been a long time friend,
and Robin Eubanks over here.
Neil came to our class on Monday,
and we had a great time.
And so this is a furthering, an enrichment
of what we're studying.
And now it's a chance for all of you to engage in this.
So you can see by their bios, they're
very distinguished world travelers, master improvisers.
So without further ado, Neil Leonard.
Robin Eubanks.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
LEONARD: Thank you, Mark.
It's wonderful to be here at MIT this evening.
I'm very pleased to have the opportunity
to play again with the great Robin Eubanks.
I'm going to play three pieces, [INAUDIBLE] pieces,
and the first two were created under very peculiar or unique
circumstances.
One was at the invitation of a conference on sonification
in Washington, DC a couple of years ago.
And I did a piece with a couple of my students
that involved data that was collected from the sun.
And so we made a piece of music out of celestial data.
And that's the first piece called Nocturnal Remix.
The second piece is a piece which
I created at the invitation of an art collector
in Italy, Gianni Bolongaro who asked me
if I would record the sounds of a sculpture
by an artist named Jannis Kounellis
And I began a piece, which went through several renditions.
And what you'll hear are the sounds recorded
in his sculpture park, an Italian vocalist
from Mount Vesuvius in Naples, and the third piece
is an improvisation on a song that you'll probably recognize.
I won't announce that right now.
Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
LEONARD: Thank you very much.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
LEONARD: Now I would like to welcome the great Robin
Eubanks.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
EUBANKS: First I want to definitely thank
Neil for inviting me up here because you probably did not
know it, but Neil and I have known each other
for-- Don't say.
Many, many, many, many, many years.
Both grew up in Philadelphia.
Actually I grew up playing in a lot of funk and rock bands.
And the first jazz band I ever played in
was with Neil in Philadelphia.
So it's great to see how he's developed.
I found out he was teaching up here at Berklee.
And we're both teaching.
I teach at Oberlin Conservatory.
And I was just really happy that he
invited me to come do this because I
don't get to do it too often.
There's still relatively few horn players
that are using all these electronics and things.
And I don't get to do too often.
So I just came off of a tour, a month-long tour last night,
or the day before maybe.
I forget now.
And actually played at the Berklee performance center
a month ago.
And I got in yesterday, and I was up all night
trying to read the manuals to find out,
remember how to work this stuff.
Because basically what I'm saying is I
don't know what I'm doping.
There's a little bit spun for me because you kind of fly
by the seat of your pants with no net, and sometimes you fall.
And it's cool.
You just get up and try to make it
so you don't notice when I fall.
But I'm just going to try some stuff
and see what happens and hope you enjoy it.
Thank you.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
EUBANKS: The first piece is just going to be complete improv.
I don't know what I'm going to do.
We'll call it MIT April 4th.
MIT April 3rd.
[EUBANKS PLAYING]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
[EUBANKS PLAYING]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
EUBANKS: That was fun.
Little bumps along the way, but it's cool.
But that's what I enjoy about it is just that it is what it is.
Just live with it.
[EUBANKS PLAYING MUSIC]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
LEONARD: We are going to finish with a piece together.
Does anybody know what a pregonero is?
EUBANKS: A what?
LEONARD: A pregonero.
ROBIN: Spanish
LEONARD: A pregonero is a street vendor, who lives in Cuba.
Actually they're all over the world.
But the ones that I know live in Cuba.
And for the past maybe 50 years, their practice was not allowed.
And as of a couple years ago, if you found yourself
in Cuba sitting in your in-laws patio,
you would begin to hear these people selling ajo, garlic,
soja, onions, exterminators who could kill
bed bugs, mice, mothers-in-law-- I didn't try them-- car alarms.
The whole deal.
This was everything you ever needed sold door-to-door.
There was no advertising, no Internet, no billboards,
no what advertisers, no handbills.
Just people roaming the streets selling their stuff.
And in the last year as they came back instantly,
I invited them to do some pieces.
And some of them were installations,
and some were performances.
Probably the most notable performance
was I decided that I don't have an interest in going
to somebody else's country and telling them what to do.
But I thought in Cuba they needed an American Idol
for the pregoneros.
And so I staged an American Idol for the pregoneros,
an Idol of the Americas, and invited the pregoneros
and gave prizes for the most musical pregon, the most poetic
pregon, the pregonero who was the most gifted and innovative
for promoting contemporary art.
We made that category.
And national television picked it up and had the pregoneros
on national television with a jury that I selected.
This project keeps on going.
And the next stop is the Venice biennial,
where my wife and I have been invited
to participate in the Cuban pavilion of the Venice biennial
in May.
But when I thought of what I could write for Robin that he
and I could play, well I still couldn't get these pregoneros
out of my mind.
So we're going to perform a short suite of pieces
and in this you'll hear the voice of one
of these pregoneros and a lot play with the song
that this person sings.
So this piece is called Pregones that I
wrote for Robin and myself.
Thank you.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
EUBANKS: [INAUDIBLE]
[LEONARD AND EUBANKS PLAYING]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]