Chris Dahlgren — viola da gamba

Chris Dahlgren was born in New York, NY, on 13 November 1961. He began with music on the cello at the age of six, and later switched to the bass. His earliest experiments with improvisation on the cello brought upon him the wrath of his elementary school music teacher, who shouted, "Get out of here, Dahlgren — you will never be a musician!" He received his BM in Jazz Studies from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music (1986) and an MA in Composition/Experimental Music from Wesleyan University (2003). Chris studied composition with La Monte Young, Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, and Christian Wolff, and studied bass with Barry Green, François Rabbath, and Dave Holland, among others. During the mid-1980s, as the in-house bassist of the Blue Wisp Jazz Club in Cincinnati, Ohio, Chris had the opportunity to learn about jazz music directly from some of the greatest American masters, such as Herb Ellis, Red Rodney, John von Ohlen, Art Lande, Charles Tolliver, and Joe Lovano. During this time he also established himself as a composer and unique voice on the bass, co-founding the band Ekimi and the music label Krysdahlark. In 1993, Chris moved back to his native New York, and for eleven years was actively performing and recording with his own bands (Slow Commotion, Best Intentions) as well as others' on the Downtown scene. From 2001 to 2009 he was a regular member of ensembles led by the seminal avant-garde composer and woodwinds player Anthony Braxton. Since 2004, he has been living in Berlin, Germany, performing, composing, and collaborating with significant European musicians, composers, and artists. In 2006 Chris began to play the viola da gamba, and has since introduced this instrument into the field of improvised music. In 2008, he formed his band LEXICON, whose debut recording was released on the Jazzwerkstatt label in March 2010. Since 2003, Chris has taught and coached ensembles in Berlin at the Musikhochschule Hanns Eisler and the Jazz Institut Berlin. He has received numerous grants and awards in music composition from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Headlands Arts Center (USA), as well as commissions from private individuals and organizations.

chrisdahlgren.com

Nathan Bontrager — viola da gamba

Geographic preamble: I live in Cologne, Germany, and play wherever. Like anyone, I am the product of various interests, desires, and experiences. But in this slice of digital real estate I'm concerned with bringing attention to myself as a musician. If you're here, you likely want to know a bit more about me and the kind of things I play. That can be arranged. If you're looking for where I went to school, famous people I studied and played with, and other such platitudes, sorry, you won't find them here. I'm tired of that game and am aiming for something more realistic here.

When I went to graduate school I started introducing myself as Nathan instead of Nate. A pretty arbitrary and laughable attempt to signal some kind of passage to adulthood or whatever. But it stuck, and something did change at that time regarding my seriousness about music. So, in that same sense, now I answer the question of "what do you do?" by saying I'm a musician, not a cellist. Here is a list of instruments I have played in some kind of professional capacity. I'm not trying to look impressive here, but the point is that I like playing a bunch of things and hope to continue to do so. I've ranked them from what I play best to worst (rest assured, things become rapidly funnier and more embarrassing as you travel down the list): cello, viola da gamba, voice, guitar, fiddle, bass, piano, organ, percussion.

What I do as a musician can be fitted, broadly, into three genres: early music, experimental/improvised music (or "free music," as the most excellent Joe Morris has dubbed it), and traditional music. Within early music I am mostly a continuo player, by design. Since I relocated to Germany, I'm looking to start or join an active gamba consort because, in my opinion, it is the greatest contribution given to the musical canon from the 16th–18th centuries. The bulk of my playing falls into the experimental/improvised context. I play in groups that write their own music, and I compose for various instruments — at present, mostly songs for cello and voice. For me, free improvisation was the first time I ever performed without fear and with a feeling of nearly unfettered control of expression with an instrument — a sort of disembodied, abstract spiritual guru for my life as a musician.

I make a real point here of saying traditional music as opposed to folk music. I'm interested in minimally commercialized music with a close connection to the oral tradition. I'm not a dogmatist about how it's played — I find this music to be malleable, though one has to be careful with interpreting it. Each stripe of traditional music possesses key ingredients that give it unique vitality. Lose these and you're left with a flaccid lump of sonic garbage, useful only for the end credits of a corporate documentary on workplace diversity. That's why I play old-time fiddle, bought a kemençe, etc.

I really enjoy teaching people about and how to play music. I used to work at a church. Working with the choir was fantastic, but the most compelling moments involved getting a mass of people who firmly believed they couldn't participate in music to open their mouths and sing together, a cappella. That's perhaps the best summation of the whole thing: music makes things happen in the doing, listening, and creating that has powerful and necessary social implications for our larger lives. Navel-gazing over. If you read this (really?) and have a strong impulse to cough into your hand while saying "bullshit," then I think I've done my job. You'll hopefully like the me that uses sounds and tones, not words, much better.

(from the website nathanbontrager.wordpress.com)