Événement

Orientations: Sara Serpa Trio & Farzad Amoozegar-Fassaie

In its final Orientations concert series, Alwan for the Arts presents a double bill performance featuring:

Sara Serpa Trio

Sara Serpa (vocals) l Ingrid Laubrock (tenor, soprano saxophone) l Erik Friedlander, cello)

&

Farzad Amoozegar-Fassaie, setar

About the artists:

Born in Lisboa, Portugal and based in New York since 2008, Sara Serpa is a singer, composer, bandleader and improviser who has been voted by the Downbeat Critics Poll 2014, 2015, 2016 as "Female Vocalist Rising Star". While Serpa is mostly known for her wordless singing with such jazz luminaries as Greg Osby, Grammy-Award nominee Danilo Perez, or as an interpreter of the Great American Songbook with Guggenheim Fellow and legendary pianist Ran Blake, she has also been collaborating with innovators like John Zorn, Guillermo Klein, Aya Nishina, Kris Davis to name a few.

Described by the JazzTimes magazine as one of the most exciting avant- gardists on the New York scene"and by the New York Times as "a singer of silvery poise and cosmopolitan outlook",Serpa has produced six albums as a leader, (with the labels Clean Feed, Tzadik and Inner Circle Music), the latest being a partnership with Portuguese guitarist André Matos, "All The Dreams" (2016).

Farzad Amoozegar-Fassaie is a specialist in the Persian plucked lutes tar and setar. As a teenager, having migrated from Iran to Canada, he began learning the classical radif tradition from Master Mohammed Reza Lotfi in US, and then moved to Iran during his early twenties to study under master musicians such as Hossein Alizadehi, Dariush Tala'i, Hooshang Zarif, Masood Shareai and Ershad Tahmasbie. While in Tehran, he lectured on Iranian music at Azad University, led various workshops on tar and setar and performed throughout Iran and the Middle East. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the departments of ethnomusicology and anthropology at UCLA.

About Alwan for the Arts

Alwan for the Arts is supported, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council of the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.