FRED MOTEN / BRANDON LÓPEZ / GERALD CLEAVER – TWO-DAY RESIDENCY

Fred Moten joins bassist Brandon López and drummer Gerald Cleaver for two nights at OTO, bringing Moten’s improvisatory use of voice and language into the extraordinarily responsive musical relationship developed by López and Cleaver. Moving between speech, poetry, song, pulse and abstraction, the trio operate as three distinct improvising voices, continually reorganising the space between language, rhythm and space.

López and Cleaver have worked together extensively as a duo, developing a musical language built around close attention, repetition, rupture and sudden shifts of density and pace. Both have long occupied vital positions within contemporary improvised music: Cleaver across a vast range of jazz and experimental contexts, and López through an uncompromising approach to the double bass that draws equally on physicality, silence, texture and propulsion. Their established rapport gives the trio a particularly elastic foundation for Moten’s voice to enter, interrupt and reshape.

Lopez and Cleaver are joined on-stage 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 third plane, putting their work in a broader lineage of legendary spoken-word jazz works, from Gil Scott-Heron and Amiri Baraka to the contemporary energies of Moor Mother and Irreversible Entanglements.