Chicago’s popular indie-funk band and SXSW performer joins us for a night of soul in Claremont. Bassel & The Supernaturals is an eclectic ensemble based in Chicago, IL led by the soulful vocals of Syrian-American songwriter Bassel Almadani. Their music combines soul, jazz, and funk with captivating lyrics about love, loss, corporate life, and a war in Syria that has directly affected Bassel’s family along with over 10,000,000 others.
Kinan Azmeh, clarinet and Dinuk Wijeratne, piano celebrate 10 years at WCCMA with new works by the acclaimed duo. The Duo creates a new sonic world through their unique fusion of Arabic and south-Asian vocabulary with classical and jazz idioms. Audiences are moved by their expressive performances and the stories that inspired them.
This performance is a part of WCCMA’s Summer Concert Series at Union Church, a music series committed to barriers free access to great music. Admission is by donation. For more information about WCCMA visit wcc-ma.org.
Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh is hailed as a “Virtuoso” and “Intensely Soulful” by the New York Times, “Spellbinding” by the New Yorker, and “Incredibly Rich Sound” by the CBC. Kinan has been touring the world as soloist, composer and improviser. His utterly distinctive sound across different musical genres has gained him international recognition as clarinetist and composer. Kinan was recently named composer-in-residence with Classical Movements for the 2017-2018 season, and he is a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble with whom he was awarded a Grammy in 2017.
Sri Lankan-born Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne is a JUNO award-winning composer, conductor, and pianist who has been described by the Toronto Star as ‘an artist who reflects a positive vision of our cultural future’, and by the New York Times as ‘exuberantly creative’. His boundary-crossing work sees him equally at home in collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets, tabla players and DJs, and takes him to international venues as poles apart as the Berlin Philharmonie and the North Sea Jazz Festival.
Photo by Manuel Vaca
Dana Lyn, violin and Kyle Sanna, guitar perform their “through the looking glass” approach to traditional Irish music. Picking up where their last album “The Great Arc” left off, Lyn and Sanna continue their investigation of environmental fragility with “The Coral Suite”: an evocative sequence of Irish tunes that mirrors the life cycles and natural processes that occur within coral reef ecosystems. With the rich vocabulary of Irish melody, and with light boxes and animated projections featuring Dana Lyn’s artwork, Lyn and Sanna create an audiovisual poem for the reef, paying tribute to its miraculous biodiversity while calling attention to the urgent need for its protection.
This performance is a part of WCCMA’s Summer Concert Series at Union Church, a music series committed to barriers free access to great music. Admission is by donation. For more information about WCCMA visit wcc-ma.org.
