Little Black Egg Big Band (Yo La Tengo & Friends) Oren Ambarchi

ISSUE Project Room returns to Red Hook for an evening with the Little Black Egg Big Band and Oren Ambarchi, presented in collaboration with Pioneer Works Center for Art and Innovation. Named for Georgia Hubley’s rarely performed solo guitar project Little Black Egg, the expanded Little Black Egg Big Band features Hubley and her Yo La Tengo compatriots Ira Kaplan and James McNew, joined by bassist Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu), an array of jazz mainstays including Susie Ibarra, Daniel Carter, Taylor Ho Bynum, and more TBA. Australian improvisor Oren Ambarchi, known for his deft and exploratory instrumental approaches, performs solo.

Yo La Tengo ​is one of the most beloved and respected bands in America. For nearly thirty years, Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew have enjoyed success entirely on their own terms– playing the world’s best concert halls, museums, and dives, dominating critics’ lists, doing a Simpsons theme, playing the Velvet Underground in “I Shot Andy Warhol,�? sharing stages with some of the most important musicians of our time, and even creating a holiday tradition onto themselves with their yearly series of Hanukkah shows at Hoboken, New Jersey’s legendary club Maxwells, from which they’ve donated hundreds of thousands to charity.

Oren Ambarchi‘s works are hesitant and tense extended songforms located in the cracks between several schools: modern electronics and processing; laminal improvisation and minimalism; hushed, pensive songwriting; the deceptive simplicity and temporal suspensions of composers such as Morton Feldman and Alvin Lucier; and the physicality of rock music, slowed down and stripped back to its bare bones, abstracted and replaced with pure signal. From the late 90’s his experiments in guitar abstraction and extended technique have led to a more personal and unique sound-world incorporating a broader palette of instruments and sensibilities. On releases such as Grapes From The Estate and In The Pendulum’s Embrace Ambarchi employed glass harmonica, strings, bells, piano, drums and percussion, creating fragile textures as light as air which tenuously coexist with the deep, wall-shaking bass tones derived from his guitar.

Image: Yo La Tengo by Carlie Armstrong