Fred Moten / Craig Taborn / Brandon Lopez Trio

Ars Nova Workshop presents a new trio bringing together three singular jazz and improvising artists – poet Fred Moten, pianist Craig Taborn, and bassist Brandon López – at Solar Myth on Sunday, February 4.

Craig Taborn and Brandon López have long been counted among the most vital voices in contemporary experimental improvised music. They are joined by Fred Moten, the inimitable poet, theorist, critic, and 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Moten’s presence, voicing poetry in an improvisatory syncopation with the instrumentalists, raises the music to a third plane, placing the music in the canon of legendary spoken word / jazz hybrids from pioneering voices like Gil Scott-Heron and Amiri Baraka and the contemporary energies of Moor Mother and Irreversible Entanglements. In 2022 López and Moten released a breathtaking collaboration with master drummer Gerald Cleaver; bringing the equally far-reaching imagination of Taborn into the mix could only yield unpredictable yet thrilling results.