SPECIAL EVENTS

Nameless Sound invites you to attend the Resounding Vision Award party Honoring Alvin Fielder, Thursday, January 19, 6:30 pm - 10 pm, at The Audley Society, 3231 Audley. Featuring a special performance by Alvin Fielder (pictured) and NS Ensemble, plus cocktails, resounding hors d’oeuvres, award ceremony, an auction of art & artifacts.

The Resounding Vision Award honors musicians whose efforts transcend aesthetics and resonate beyond the performance venue. It honors artists who pursue a vision of progress in our communities. Past recipients of the Resounding Vision Award: Joe McPhee, William Parker, Pauline Oliveros, Curley Cormier.

Alvin Fielder is a pioneering jazz drummer, an important educator, and one of the founding members of the enormously influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians cooperative. Born in Meridian, MS in 1935, Fielder studied pharmacology at Texas Southern University from 1953 to 1956. During his years in Houston, he worked with various jazz and R&B groups including the Pluma-Davis Sextet, the house band at the legendary Eldorado Ballroom. He then moved on to Chicago, where he joined an early version of the Sun Ra Arkestra and played with musicians like Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Anderson and Muhal Richard Abrams, with whom he organized the AACM in 1965 and appeared on its debut LP, Roscoe Mitchell’s “Sound” in 1967.

Fielder returned home to Mississippi in 1969, where he ran the family pharmacy, worked to desegregate the schools, and developed the Black Arts Music Society. BAMS brought countless jazz improvisers to Jackson and inspired a new generation of the city’s musicians (including a young Cassandra Wilson). In 1975, Fielder began working regularly with New Orleans saxophonist Edward “Kidd” Jordan. The association breathed new life into his career, and since then he’s appeared on a handful of potent and critically acclaimed releases. Fielder’s performances and clinics here in Houston over the past few years are ample evidence that at age 76, this legendary drummer is still at the height of his creative power.
-Pete Gershon
SIGNAL TO NOISE

All proceeds benefit Nameless Sound's Creative Music Education Program and Concert Series.