LIVING BY LANTERNS

Co-led by Mike Reed and Jason Adasiewicz, two of the fastest-rising young stars of Chicago's insanely vibrant jazz scene, Living by Lanterns was formed specifically to bring together four of Chicago's and four of New York's leading players for a special and unique project concept. Commissioned by Experimental Sound Studio (ESS), the music was created in response to material contained in ESS’s vast Sun Ra Audio Archive. Rather than a Sun Ra tribute, Reed and Adasiewicz have crafted a melodically rich, harmonically expansive body of themes orchestrated from fragments extracted from a rehearsal tape marked "NY 1961", featuring Ra on electric piano, John Gilmore on tenor sax and flute, and Ronnie Boykins on bass. The tunes on Old Myth/New Science were written by the co-leaders based on the 1961 tape. That tape contains no compositions per-se, but there are a lot of stream-of-consciousness ideas and some of these ideas were teased out, read more...