Matt Mitchell & Anna Webber

saturday, september 28

TIME: 4:15pm-5:15pm

VENUE: logan center performance penthouse. 915 east 60th st.

Matt Mitchell & Anna Webber

“Kindred spirits in every sense of the word, Webber and Mitchell are restless intellects whose multi-hued music continually pushes the outside of the envelope.” – All About Jazz 

Two of new music’s most powerful and virtuosic composer-performers get together for a dazzling and thoughtful program of radical compositions and improvisations. Featuring brilliant writing and telepathic improvisational interplay, the music is concise, intense, and endlessly imaginative. An essential view into the Downtown scene’s newest generation of musical masters. 

Matt Michell is a pianist, composer, and electronic musician interested in the intersections of various strains of acoustic, electric, composed, and improvised new music. He has released several forward-thinking, critically acclaimed, and influential albums as a leader on Pi Recordings, Screwgun Records, and Out of Your Head Records, and together with Kate Gentile he runs Obliquity Records. He leads the ensemble Phalanx Ambassadors and co-leads Snark Horse with Kate Gentile. 

He is also a member of several significant and acclaimed creative music ensembles, including Dan Weiss’s Starebaby, Miles Okazaki’s Trickster, Ches Smith’s We All Break, Kate Gentile’s Find Letter X, Anna Webber’s Simple Trio, Jon Irabagon’s Outright!, Sara Serpa’s Intimate Strangers, and Yuhan Su’s Liberated Gesture. He has a longstanding association with Tim Berne, and he has played extensively in the ensembles of many major figures in improvised music, including Dave Douglas, Steve Coleman, David Binney, John Hollenbeck, Miguel Zenon, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Linda May Han Oh, Jonathan Finlayson, Mario Pavone, and Darius Jones. He has taught extensively with the Brooklyn-based School for Improvisational Music, as well as at the New School, NYU, and the Siena Jazz Workshop. He is a 2015 recipient of a Doris Duke Impact Award and a 2012 recipient of a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.

Anna Webber is a flutist, saxophonist, composer, and Guggenheim Fellow whose work and interests live in the aesthetic overlap between avant-garde jazz and new classical music. Her new album, Shimmer Wince, explores just intonation in a jazz setting and is a follow-up to her critically acclaimed release, Idiom, which earned her the title of JazzTimes’ Top Composer of the Year in 2021. Webber was also named a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow and voted Rising Star Flutist in the Downbeat Critics’ Poll in 2020. Her 2020 release, Both Are True (Greenleaf Music), co-led with saxophonist/composer Angela Morris, was named a Top-10 Best Release of that year by The New York Times, and her album Clockwise was voted #6 Best Album of 2019 in the NPR Jazz Critics’ Poll. 

Webber has additionally been honored with the Margaret Whitton Award (administered by the Jazz Gallery); grants from the Copland Fund (2021 & 2019), the Shifting Foundation (2015), the New York Foundation for the Arts (2017), the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Canada Council for the Arts; and residencies from Exploring the Metropolis (2019), the MacDowell Colony (2017 & 2020), the Millay Colony for the Arts (2015), and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts (2014). She is the recipient of the 2024 Alpert Prize in Music. 

The musicians:

Anna Webber — tenor saxophone/flute
Matt Mitchell — piano