8:30pm.

Austin Wulliman: Live News

The News From Utopia is the title of violinist Austin Wulliman's debut release as composer. This concert presents the Chicago premiere of several works by him and continues unspinning the breaking News with questionable journalistic practices and improvisational lines of weaving the conspiratorial thread. The record is a solo project built from many multi-tracked layers of Wulliman, which he composed, recorded and mixed. The live experience will incorporate electronics built of samples from the album, as well as live performances from himself using live violin processing and sampling and video by Argentinean artist Daniel Bruno. Additionally, the concert includes Down Pat for electric guitar and electronics, written for the unique talents of guitarist and improviser Alec Goldfarb.

Violinist, composer and educator Austin Wulliman embodies the imagined and empathizes with the absurd through sounds both familiar and radical, telling stories with a limitless passion for tuning cries from every corner of the human capacity to hear. He is a member of JACK Quartet, called “the nation’s most important quartet” by the New York Times and has been praised as a “gifted, adventuresome violinist” by the Chicago Tribune. Through in-depth collaboration with performers and composers working in a panoply of aesthetic realms, Austin searches daily for the violin’s voice in today’s musical world.

Pianist Cory Smythe has worked closely with pioneering artists in new, improvisatory, and classical music, including multi-instrumentalist-composer Tyshawn Sorey, violinist Hilary Hahn, and transdisciplinary composers from Anthony Braxton to Zosha Di Castri. His own “perplexingly perfect” (The Wire) music “dissolves the lines between composition and improvisation with rigor” (Chicago Reader). 

Smythe has been featured at the Tectonics, Newport Jazz, Wien Modern, and Mostly Mozart festivals. He has received commissions from Present Music, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, the Wiener Festwochen, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, of which he is a longtime member. Smythe received a Grammy award for his work with Ms. Hahn and a 2022 Herb Alpert Award in music. 

Improvising wisps and ringlets of "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" at a piano augmented by novel microtonal extensions, Smythe explores an instrument that, like the love affair lamented in the Kern/Harbach standard, isn't quite what it seems.