Ethan Iverson ← THE MATRIX of FABULOUS DISCOVERY

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Ethan Iverson

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Who I Am & Where I Live

Name: Ethan Iverson
City: Brooklyn, NY
Country: United States
Hometown: Menomonie, Wisconsin

My Life

Bio: Born February 11, 1973 in Menomonie, Wisconsin – moved to New York City in 1991 and played dance classes, comedy sports, theatre pits, and in the New York Tango Trio with Raul Jaurena and Pablo Aslan – studied with Fred Hersch, then Sophia Rosoff, – became music director of Mark Morris Dance Group in 1998 – was part of late-’90s indie jazz scene along with Bill McHenry, Jeff Williams, Reid Anderson and others, mainly documented on Fresh Sound New Talent, thanks to Jorge Rossy – worked as a sideman with Kurt Rosenwinkel and Mark Turner in 2000/2001.

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Pianist, composer, and writer Ethan Iverson was a founding member of The Bad Plus, a game-changing collective with Reid Anderson and David King. The New York Times called TBP “…Better than anyone at melding the sensibilities of post-60’s jazz and indie rock.” During his 17-year tenure TBP performed in venues as diverse as the Village Vanguard, Carnegie Hall, and Bonnaroo; collaborated with Joshua Redman, Bill Frisell, and the Mark Morris Dance Group; and created a faithful arrangement of Igor Stravinky’s The Rite of Spring and a radical reinvention of Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction.

Iverson also has been in the critically-acclaimed Billy Hart quartet for well over a decade and occasionally performs with an elder statesman like Albert “Tootie” Heath or Ron Carter. For over 15 years Iverson’s website Do the Math has been a repository of musician-to-musician interviews and analysis, surely one reason Time Out New York selected Iverson as one of 25 essential New York jazz icons: “Perhaps NYC’s most thoughtful and passionate student of jazz tradition—the most admirable sort of artist-scholar.”

In 2017 Iverson premiered the score “Pepperland” for the Mark Morris Dance Group and with Aaron Greenwald co-curated a major centennial celebration of Thelonious Monk at Duke University. In spring 2018 Iverson premiered Concerto to Scale with the American Composers Orchestra and in fall 2018 released Temporary Kings, a duo album with Mark Turner on ECM.

Other musicians Iverson has shared the stage with in the last two years include Miranda Cuckson, Tom Harrell, David Williams, Victor Lewis, Houston Person, Ben Street, Eric McPherson, Dayna Stephens, Thomas Morgan, Chris Potter, Joe Sanders, Melissa Aldana, Ravi Coltrane, Jorge Rossy, Josephine Bode, Dodo Kis, and Gerald Cleaver.

Sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes...

Stoked and steamed and sensual in the widest sense of the word...

Limned in cadenced song...

The Recôncavo is a smile inside an irony wrapped in a conundrum.

► The matrix originated as an extension of a record shop opened to divulge the little known music of the people of the Recôncavo and sertão of Bahia, Brazil (per this interview with David Dye for U.S. National Public Radio and hence a sugarcane cutter as our logo), along with other great Brazilian music.

► But in order to provide pathways from around the world to these largely unknown artists, the matrix has to do likewise for all artists everywhere.