Bourgie Hall presents

The Dead Lecturers – Downtown Crown in the Key of Royalty

This event has been CANCELLED.

Inspired by the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Dead Lecturers explore what it means to be a young black artist navigating their way through downtown New York City in the 1980s, through language and musical compositions that are both reflexive and improvisational.

In connection with the exhibition Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music

Artists
The Dead Lecturers 
Thomas Sayers Ellis, words

Thomas Sayers Ellis grew up in Washington, DC, and earned his MFA from Brown University. He is the author of Skin, Inc. (2013) and The Maverick Room (2005). He cofounded the Dark Room Collective in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and received a Whiting Award in 2005. Ellis has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Case Western Reserve University, and Lesley University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

James Brandon Lewis, tenor saxophone

Lewis’ melodic identity encompasses ancient and future, inside and outside, density and openness, church and street. He’s a master of the short infectious motif, and like Sonny Rollins, devotes long expanses of his improvisation to the stretching and refracting and mutating of short phrases. The son of a minister, Lewis grew up playing in church and hearing the titans of jazz at home, and then as he got older, encountering Buffalo artists like the free-jazz saxophonist Charles Gayle and the groove-minded saxophonist Grover Washington Jr.

Melanie Dyer, viola

Melanie Dyer performs and composes in creative, improvised and through-composed music spheres. She trained with William Lincer (Principal Violist, New York Philharmonic), Lee Yeingst (Principal Violist, Colorado Symphony Orchestra), John Jake Kella (NY Metropolitan Opera) and Naomi Fellows (Colorado Symphony Orchestra); and studied viola performance at the LaMont School of Music/University of Denver.

Brandon Lopez, upright bass

From the New York Philharmonic’s David Geffen Hall to the DIY basements of Brooklyn, Lopez has worked beside many luminaries of jazz, classical, poetry, and experimental music, including Fred Moten, John Zorn, Okkyung Lee, Ingrid Laubrock, Tony Malaby, Tyshawn Sorey, Bill Nace, Chris Potter, Edwin Torres, Tom Rainey, Cecilia Lopez, Sun Ra Arkestra, Susan Alcorn, Mette Rasmussen, and many others.

Thursday, February 2, 2023 at 8:00pm
To purchase your tickets visit: www.mbam.qc.ca/en/bourgie-hall/