4–5 February 2027
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.
Fred Moten (born 1962) is an American cultural theorist, poet, and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies. Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of California, Riverside; he previously taught at Duke University, and the University of Iowa. His scholarly texts include The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study which was co-authored with Stefano Harney, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and The Universal Machine (Duke University Press, 2018). He has published numerous poetry collections, including The Little Edges, The Feel Trio, B Jenkins, and Hughson's Tavern.
Brandon Lopez is a bassist and composer living in New York City. His work deals with improvisation, finding new sonic possibilities on the double bass.
Collaborations with the likes Fred Moten, Gerald Cleaver, John Zorn, The Mat Maneri Quartet, Nate Wooley’s “knknighgh”, Satoko Fuji, Zeena Parkins, Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey, Standing On The Corner, Cecilia Lopez, Ash Fure, Joe Morris, Tyshawn Sorey, and many others.
Playing with the New York Philharmonic 2019 season as a featured soloist with the New York Philharmonic in the premier of Ashley Fure’s “Filament” under the baton of Jaap Van Zweden. His solo work has been featured at the Met Museum in a live collaboration with silent films by directors Stan Brakhage and Germaine Dulac. His collaborative work with Fred Moten and Gerald Cleaver was critically acclaimed by publications of note and won Best of Jazz 2022 in the NYTimes. His most recent solo recording won best of 2023 in the NYC Jazz record. He’s been awarded the Van Lier Fellowship (2018) and Jerome Artist in Residence (2020) at Roulette Intermedium, The Artist in Residence at Issue Project Room (2018), commissions from the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation for the recording of SUN BURNS OUT YOUR EYES (2022), 2023 NYSCA grant for the multimedia piece NADA SAGRADA premiered at the Vision Festival, and an award in 2020 from the Doris Duke Charitable Trust.
He is currently a instructor of improvisation and double bass at the New School for Jazz.
Gerald Cleaver is one of the New York jazz scene’s leading drummer/composers, who covers a wide range of stylistic ground. Having played with jazz masters Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris and Ray Bryant as well as the leading lights of the AACM, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith and Henry Threadgill, he is a product of many traditions within creative music.
