Bio:
Anna Webber (b. 1984) is a New York-based flutist, saxophonist, and composer whose interests and work live the overlap between avant-garde jazz and new classical music. Her new album, Clockwise, featuring a septet comprised of several of the most creative musicians working in New York’s avant-garde, is out on Pi Recordings (February 2019). Webber is joined on Clockwise by Jeremy Viner, Jacob Garchik, Chris Hoffman, Matt Mitchell, Chris Tordini, and Ches Smith.
In addition to this septet, Webber also leads the critically acclaimed Simple Trio, featuring drummer John Hollenbeck and pianist Matt Mitchell, with which she has released two albums on Skirl Records: Binary (2016) and SIMPLE (2014). She has furthermore recorded for Munich’s Pirouet Records with the now defunct Percussive Mechanics. Her other projects a big band co-led with Angela Morris; Jagged Spheres with Devin Gray and Elias Stemeseder; EAVE with Erik Hove, Evan Tighe, and Vicky Mettler; and The Hero of Warchester with Nathaniel Morgan and Liz Kosack.
Webber has performed and/or recorded with Dan Weiss’ Sixteen; Jen Shyu’s Jade Tongue; Matt Mitchell’s A Pouting Grimace and Sprees; Dave Douglas’ ENGAGE; the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble; Ches Smith’s Laugh Ash; Adam Hopkins’ Crickets; Geof Bradfield’s Yes and...; Ohad Talmor’s Grand Ensemble; Fabian Almazan’s Realm of Possibilities; Noah Garabedian’s Big Butter and the Eggmen; the Erik Hove Chamber Ensemble; a sextet from Bang on a Can All-Stars member Ken Thomson; Harris Eisenstadt’s Recent Developments; and the Marike van Dijk Stereography Project. She recently played in the world premiere of Sila: The Breath of the World by Pulitzer Prize-winner John Luther Adams at the Lincoln Center.
Webber is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. She has additionally been awarded grants from the Shifting Foundation (2015), the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Canada Council for the Arts and residencies from the MacDowell Colony (2017), the Millay Colony for the Arts (2015), and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts (2014). She is the winner of the 2010 Prix François-Marcaurelle at the OFF Festival of Jazz in Montreal. In 2014 she won the BMI Foundation Charlie Parker Composition Prize as a member of the BMI Jazz Composers' Workshop.
Originally from British Columbia, Webber studied music at McGill University in Montreal before moving to New York City in 2008. She holds master’s degrees from both Manhattan School of Music and the Jazz Institute Berlin.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
...pay attention to Webber, both in the moment and in the future.
- Bill Meyer, Downbeat
Reedist Anna Webber, a Brooklynite by way of British Columbia, is one of the most exciting new arrivals on the New York avant-garde jazz scene in the past couple years. ...her detail-rich writing recalls the work of elders as disparate as Tim Berne and Henry Threadgill, and her busy motion evokes a fizzy sort of exhilaration.
- Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).