Ivy Room presents

—

THURSDAY JULY 31ST

—

HELEN GILLET

REED MATHIS

(partially seated show)

—

Doors 7:00pm / Show 8:00pm
ADVANCE TICKETS AVAILABLE

—
IVY ROOM
860 San Pablo Ave, Albany • 21+

HELEN GILLET

—

Helen Gillet is a musician, composer, cellist, singer (Belgian French & English), improviser and looping artist. Her prolific career has won her awards of Offbeat Best of the Beat, Gambit Big Easy Awards, featured artist at the New Orleans Jazz Museum and has been nominated three times, most recently in 2023, as a rising star in Downbeat Magazine's Critics Poll. She has played, recorded with many musicians over the past 20 years, including members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, AACM (Chicago), ICP (Holland), Members of Morphine, Kidd Jordan, Marianne Faithful, Cassandra Wilson, Delfeayo and Jason Marsalis, Steve Earle, Iron & Wine (North America Tour 2018), Zachary Richard, opened up as a solo artist for Les Claypool at the Orpheum Theatre in New Orleans in 2003 and Jeff Tweedy at Lincoln Center in 2019. She has performed at a variety of festivals and venues worldwide including the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, Dark MOFO Festival in Tasmania, Darwin World Music Festival, New Orleans Jazz Festival, New Direction Cello Society Festival at Berkeley College of Music, Kennedy Center and at The Big Ears Music Festival in 2024 and many more.

Helen Gillet is a singer-songwriter and surrealist-archeologist exploring synthesized sounds, texture, and rhythm using an acoustic cello. For someone with her varied background, New Orleans, with its mix of cultures and musics, seemed like a natural place to call home.

Born in Belgium, and raised in Singapore from the ages of 2 to 11, Helen Gillet was routinely shuttled between the homelands of her Belgian father and American mother planting the notion that a healthy ecosystem in life and art is one of immense variety. Over the years, working in New Orleans with musicians of all stripes, from avant-garde jazz and classical to pop and funk, Gillet has developed a singular polyglot style. The core of her work is solo performance with live looping, layering cello parts and vocal lines. Rhythmic figures emerge with bowed or plucked ostinatos or a variety of rubbing and slapping on the body of the cello, then enhanced with melodies played or sung in her haunting alto. Her mixed musical vocabulary is commensurate with her disparate travels — French chanson of the 1940s, Belgian folk tunes sung in Walloon, a mix of rock and punk from the likes of PJ Harvey and X-Ray Spex, and her own affecting originals, like audience favorite “Julien,” sung in a mix of French and English.

Gillet’s solo performance is known for its enigmatic quality as she fabricates each song with innovative use of the cello and true mastery of live looping technology.

REED MATHIS

—

While on tour with various bands over the past few years—including Billy & the Kids (led by the Grateful Dead’s Bill Kreutzmann), Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey and Tea Leaf Green—bassist extraordinaire Reed Mathis spent his spare time rearranging Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 3” and “Symphony No. 6,” recording each newly reimagined movement with a long and impressive “who’s-who” of his musical brethren, including Phish’s Page McConnell and Mike Gordon, Galactic’s Stanton Moore, Brad and Andrew Barr (The Slip / Barr Brothers), Marco Benevento, Joe Russo, Robert Walter and Mike Dillon.

For the majority of the nine movements that comprise the two symphonies, Reed traveled to these musicians’ respective hometowns, recording them in their natural environment. Having befriended many musical greats throughout his career, Reed chose the artists that, he felt, best embodied the spirit of Beethoven. It’s little coincidence that, unlike contemporaries in modern-day orchestras, these “rock” musicians had comparatively little classical music training (if at all). In fact, most of them confessed that, prior to Reed pitching them on the project, they had no intimate prior knowledge of the movement that they were drafted to perform.

This, in fact, suited Reed’s vision for bringing Beethoven into the 21st century better than if the musicians had been versed in the composer’s work. Reed wanted his collaborators to have the freedom to create and interpret as themselves. His concept being that even when composed music—be it a song or a symphony—has been performed for centuries, the notes and rhythms are still supposed to be embedded with personal context. After all, the music that most deeply affects us is music that is relatable. Classical music purists tend to disregard that directive in favor of a strict handed-down construct. Reed’s mission with this project, then, was to free these symphonies from their historic chains and place them back in the here-and-now. It’s music of the moment, even if that moment has been happening for more than 200 years.

Fifteen musicians and many cross-country trips in the making, Reed Mathis’ rearrangements and recordings of Beethoven “Symphony No. 3” and “Symphony No. 6” will be released as ‘Beathoven,’ via Brooklyn-based independent record label, Royal Potato Family.