International Contemporary Ensemble Announces New Ensemble Members Matana Roberts and Fay Victor and Artist-in-Residence Vimbayi Kaziboni

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The International Contemporary Ensemble Announces 
New Ensemble Members Matana Roberts and Fay Victor and
Artist-in-Residence Vimbayi Kaziboni

www.iceorg.org

New York, NY (September 23, 2021) — The International Contemporary Ensemble welcomes Matana Roberts and Fay Victor as new, permanent Ensemble members and Vimbayi Kaziboni as Artist-in-Residence for the 2021-22 season. As the Ensemble approaches its 20th year anniversary, Roberts, Victor, and Kaziboni will join and lead creative collaborations, as well as shape programming and policies in support of the organization’s overall mission to develop new work built on equity, belonging, and cultural responsiveness.

“Alongside growing our board of directors and staff, we are thrilled to welcome Matana, Fay, and Vimbayi as part of the International Contemporary Ensemble. They each have a collaborative history with the Ensemble that we are excited to grow and deepen together,” says Executive Director Jennifer Kessler.

In 2018, Matana Roberts joined the Ensemble Evolution summer music program at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity as faculty. Since then, Roberts has become a core faculty member at the Ensemble Evolution sessions, held virtually since 2020 in partnership with The New School’s College of Performing Arts. “In 2019 we had the honor to give the world premiere of Matana’s I call america: Sandy Speaks..., a mixed media sound quilt within their larger I CALL AMERICA series. We look forward to collaborating more deeply with Matana in curation and performance throughout upcoming projects this season,” says Artistic Director Ross Karre.

The Ensemble first started working with Vimbayi Kaziboni in 2019 for the Mostly Mozart Festival, conducting works by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Dai Fujikura, Ash Fure, Ann Cleare, and more. In the fall of that same year, Kaziboni conducted the U.S. premiere of George Lewis’s Soundlines and the world premiere of Augusta Read Thomas’s The Auditions as well as Copland’s Appalachian Spring with Martha Graham Dance Company. “Vimbayi has a keen ear for distinctive sound worlds and carefully balanced orchestrations. He is an inviting and generous collaborator on the podium and a thoughtful curator,” says Karre.

“We first were introduced to Fay Victor through our work with The New School’s College of Performing Arts and we were grateful to have her join as a faculty member for our Ensemble Evolution program this past Summer. She is an extremely versatile artist who has opened up new windows of sonic creativity for our ensemble,” says Karre. Victor collaborated most recently with bassoonist Rebekah Heller for a duo project that was shared during the Ensemble’s TUES@7 series and at their appearance at the Dark Music Days festival hosted by Roulette Intermedium and Harpa in Iceland.

The artistry of Roberts, Victor, and Kaziboni fosters new opportunities for the Ensemble to grow by way of new works, collaborative environments, and decision-making processes within the organization. Stay tuned for more information about the Ensemble’s 2021-22 season, including opportunities to experience and engage with the work of Roberts, Victor, and Kaziboni.

About Matana Roberts
A dynamic saxophonist, composer, improviser, and mixed media sound conceptualist, Matana Roberts' acclaimed artistic practice aims to expose the mystical roots and the intuitive spirit-raising traditions of American creative expression in their music and art. Their innovative work has forged new conceptual approaches to considering narrativity, history, and political expression within improvisatory structures.

In dealing with their love of narrative, Roberts is currently developing one of their most wide-ranging projects Coin Coin. Coin Coin is a sound monument to the human experience, centered around their love of American History, spanning centuries. Roberts envisions history moving through an array of sociopolitical storylines, kaleidoscopically moving through a synesthetic array of artistic ideas. In addition to 12 concept albums within this project, four have already been released. These concept albums typically feature a combination of western and graphic notation, forming collage-like structures, which Roberts calls P.S.Q. (Panoramic Sound Quilting) and has steered into performances and recordings that transcend genre – as for instance in the COIN COIN recordings : Mississippi Moonchile and Gens de Couleur Libre, River Run Thee, Memphis.

Roberts is also a documented visual artist and has participated in solo and group exhibitions as artist and performer at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the ICA (Chicago and Philadelphia), Bergen Kunstall (Norway), DAAD Gallerie (Berlin), MOMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Fridman Gallery (NYC) and most recently The Luhring Augustine Gallery (NYC).

Beyond the experimental combination of sound, image, prose, song, film, objects, musical improvisation and western notation, these works illuminate history and sociopolitical topoi – multiple narratives, historical consciousness and political emphases encounter both preset and improvised structures. The expressivity of their work continues to be the basis for their numerous immersive concerts and performances regardless of project.

While performing as a musician or as a visual artist, or composer, Roberts almost always simultaneously acts as an ethnographer, a storyteller and a politically engaged artist. Learn more at www.matanaroberts.com.

About Fay Victor
Fay Victor is a sound artist who uses performance, improvisation and composition to examine representations of modern life and blackness while honing a unique vision for the vocal role in jazz and improvised music. Victor has an “everything is everything” aesthetic, using the freedom in the moment to inform the appropriate musical response, viewing the vocal instrument as full of possibilities for sound exploration. The voice, a vocal conduit for direct messages in an improvising context. Victor embraces all of these ideas in real time, aiming to push the vocal envelope to forge greater expression. On Victor’s 11 critically acclaimed albums, one can hear the through line of this expansive expression. Victor’s current release, WE’VE HAD ENOUGH on the ESP-Disk label is the second outing from Victor’s improvising quartet, SoundNoiseFUNK.

Victor’s work has found light in media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Rolling Stone Magazine & The Huffington Post. Victor’s performed with luminaries such as William Parker, Roswell Rudd, Dr. Randy Weston, Nicole Mitchell, Misha Mengelberg, Myra Melford, Archie Shepp, Marc Ribot, and Tyshawn Sorey to name but a few. Performance highlights include The Museum of Modern Art & The Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), The Hammer Museum (LA), The Kolner Philharmonie (Germany), De Young Museum (SF), Symphony Space (NY), The Earshot Jazz Festival (Seattle), The Winter Jazz Festival (NYC) and the Bimhuis (Netherlands). As a composer, Victor has been awarded prizes such as the 2017 Herb Albert/Yaddo Fellow in Music Composition and a 2018 AIR in Composition for the Headlands Center for the Arts in the Marin Headlands in Northern California. As an educator, Victor is currently on the Faculty at the New School of Jazz & Contemporary Music and chairs the Advisory Board for the Jazz Leaders Fellowship via the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, a new initiative to fund and support black female and non-binary jazz artists. Victor continues to give talks, lectures and masterclasses on jazz, creative improvisation, and political engagement through artistic expression and more at institutions around the world. Learn more at www.fayvictor.com.

About Vimbayi Kaziboni
Widely sought-after for his depth of approach and his interpretive imagination and expressivity, Zimbabwean-born conductor and curator Vimbayi Kaziboni (b. 1988) has led many critically lauded performances with orchestras across the globe at some of the most prestigious concert halls in the world, including Carnegie Hall, Walt Disney Hall, Davies Hall, Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Philharmonie de Paris, Elbphilharmonie, Deutschlandfunk, Hessischer Rundfunk, Sala Sao Paulo, among others.

In the 2021-22 season, Kaziboni makes debuts at the Berlin Philharmonie, Kölner Philharmonie, Tonhalle Düsseldorf, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Wiener Konzerthaus, Royal Concertgebuow, and at series such as Beethovenfest Bonn, Donaueschingen Muziktage, Music Viva, Spoleto Festival, and LA Phil Green Umbrella Series. He will return to conduct the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Contrechamps, International Contemporary Ensemble, and will make debuts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, Boston Lyric Opera, Michigan Opera Theatre, and Grossman Ensemble. He will also premiere new works by Georg Frederic Haas, George Lewis, Hannah Kendall, inti figgis-vizueta, Heiner Goebbels, and Felipe Lara, among many others.

Highlights in the coming season include a collaboration with director Yuval Sharon, in a new and visionary production of Puccini’s La Bohéme (Boston Lyric Opera, Michigan Opera Theatre, Spoleto Festival), premiering and touring a new evening-length work for large orchestra and mixed media by the German director-composer, Heiner Goebbels with the Ensemble Modern Orchestra (EMO) throughout Western Europe, conducting Gérard Grisey’s spectralist magnum opus Les Espaces Acoustiques with the orchestra of the Geneva Haute École de Musique and Ensemble Contrechamps in Switzerland, leading Ensemble Intercontemporain in a week-long Boston residency. Later in the summer he’ll assume a role as Assistant Conductor for Sir Simon Rattle at the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall in London.

A former Fulbright Fellow (2013-14), Mr. Kaziboni holds degrees from the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles and the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts (HfMDK) in Germany. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Orchestral Studies and Contemporary Music at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, a fellow at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Music Director and Conductor of the Composers Conference and Artistic Advisor of the Boston Lyric Opera. Learn more at www.vimbayikaziboni.com.

About the International Contemporary Ensemble
The International Contemporary Ensemble is an artist collective that is transforming the way music is created and experienced. The Ensemble’s 36 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Works by emerging composers have anchored the Ensemble’s programming since its founding in 2001, and the group’s recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music’s present.

A recipient of the American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award and the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, the International Contemporary Ensemble was also named the 2014 Musical America Ensemble of the Year. The group currently serves as artists-in-residence at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ Mostly Mozart Festival, and previously led a five-year residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The International Contemporary Ensemble was featured at the Ojai Music Festival from 2015 to 2017, and at recent festivals abroad such as gmem-CNCM-marseille and Vértice at Cultura UNAM, Mexico City. Other performance stages have included the Park Avenue Armory, ice floes at Greenland’s Diskotek Sessions, and boats on the Amazon River.

OpenICE, made possible with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, offers free concerts and interactive, educational programming wherever the Ensemble performs. The International Contemporary Ensemble advances music technology and digital communications as an empowering tool for artists from all backgrounds. Curricular activities include a residency and coursework at the New School College of Performing Arts, along with a summer intensive program, called Ensemble Evolution, where topics of equity, diversity, and inclusion build new bridges and pathways for the future of creative sound practices. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the Ensemble. Read more at www.iceorg.org and watch over 350 videos of live performances and documentaries at www.digitice.org.

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Photo Credits: (top left) Matana Roberts by Evan Hunter McKnight; (top right) Vimbayi Kaziboni by Ilkhom Theatre; (bottom) Fay Victor by Kyra Kverno