Webber/Morris Big Band

The Webber/Morris Big Band is a New York-based ensemble comprising some 17 members and co-led by Anna Webber and Angela Morris. The former is a flutist, saxophonist, and composer whose interests and music overlap avant-garde jazz and new classical music. She also leads Anna Webber's Simple Trio, with John Hollenbeck and Matt Mitchell. She has recorded several albums under her own name, including 2019's acclaimed septet outing Clockwise. Morris, also a composer, flutist, and saxophonist who grew up playing violin, writes tunes that juxtapose and sometimes marry avant-jazz, new music, and pop. Her collaborative trio TMT with pianist Cat Toren and drummer Anthony Taddeo issued Asleep in the Dust in 2019, an art book/double audio-disc collaboration with visual artist Jerry Birchfield. In performance and in the studio, their band's personnel include many of New York's current generation of choice improvisers, such as trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, bassist Adam Hopkins, trombonist Jen Baker, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, and guitarist Dustin Carlson. The Webber/Morris Big Band assembled for the first time in 2015, consciously exploring both new music and sounds from the last century in vanguard jazz, classical minimalism, pop, noise, and other genres. They integrated improvisation and through-composed material in unorthodox ways, often using extra-musical sources -- from poetry to mathematics -- to form the foundations of new works. While their instrumentation is typical of the traditional big band, their sound usually mutates into something unpredictable. The saxophonists rotate filling the tenor chair while the other conducts her own works. In 2020, Dave Douglas' Greenleaf Music label issued their debut album, Both Are True.
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