John Knowles Paine Concert Hall
3 Oxford St
Cambridge, MA 02138

Two of the most inventive figures in contemporary improvised music share a single evening in Paine Hall.

In an evening that puts tuning, timbre, and place at its center, two of the most inventive figures in contemporary improvised music share a single evening in Paine Hall. Curated by Claire Chase.

Trumpeter, vocalist and composer Amir ElSaffar presents his New Quartet: ElSaffar on trumpet and voice, Terri Lyne Carrington on drums, Tania Giannouli on piano and Ole Mathisen on tenor saxophone. The quartet first played together in 2023 at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, a concert released in 2025 on Maqām Records; Terri Lyne Carrington joins them here on drums. For this piece, the piano is retuned to ElSaffar's own microtonal scheme, which pulls seven of the twelve pitches away from equal temperament, one by a full quarter-tone.

Percussionist and composer Susie Ibarra’s “Sky Islands” was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Music and premiered at Asia Society in New York in July 2024. Commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation, it is performed here by her ensemble Talking Gong (Ibarra, pianist Alex Peh, flutist Claire Chase) with guest percussionist Levy Lorenzo and the Parker Quartet. Ibarra took the piece from the broadleaf forests of northern Luzon in the Philippines, an endangered region with thirty-one endemic species, and built it on the interlocking rhythms and melodies of Kalinga and Cordilleras bamboo, gong and flute music. She has described it as a call to action on biodiversity and climate. Ibarra writes for kulintang gong sets, sarunay xylophones, drumset, gongs and cymbals, bamboo poles laid across the floor, and living plants wired with contact microphones, alongside string quartet and electronics.

There will be one 15-minute intermission.