When I interview chef Bun Lai of Miya’s Sushi in New Haven, Connecticut, he has just wrapped filming a TV series in which he travels the world creating new dishes from exotic invasive species. Think a hot, Asian Andrew-Zimmern-of-Bizarre Foods-goes-green kind of thing. On the menu? Killer bees, poisonous vipers, and stingrays.

Photo by Dominic Perri

“It’s really about having us open our minds to other ways of eating and living,” he says of the show. “Under the surface, invasive species are tied to food justice and food security.” Bun, unlike many chefs, takes the farm-to-table, or in this case sea-to-table, movement beyond trendy to his personal hope for the future of Earth and the human race.

In addition to being a James Beard Foundation-nominated chef, he is an ambassador for the healthy oceans advocacy group Seafood Watch; a popular keynote speaker on sustainable food; and a contributor to Scientific American, among other publications.

At Miya’s Sushi, Bun puts his knowledge of, and beliefs about, sustainability into exquisite practice. Not only does he work solely with ingredients that are sustainably harvested, but he also creates unique menu items that feature local invasive species not typically found on American plates.

Take, for example, locally foraged mugwort, an invasive herb originally brought here by the Pilgrims. Or Asian shore crab—which migrated en masse to North America on the ballasts of ships in the 1980s—that Bun harvests off the Connecticut coast. Or tilapia grown by students of Connecticut’s Bridgeport Regional Aquaculture Science & Technology Education Center.

Photo by Dominic Perri

Bun and his coworkers dive for ”trash fish” and shellfish on 75 acres of shellfishing grounds just 12 miles from the restaurant (which owns the fishing rights). He also has a 10-acre woodland farm 7 miles from Miya’s. “We do some growing,” he says, “but a whole lot more foraging.”

Miya’s 42-page menu is a sort of manifesto, as educational as it is mouthwatering. Kiribati sashimi is made from spear-caught (no net fishing, please) invasive Mexican lionfish, mineral-rich Kiribati sea salt, and “a dozen profoundly mouth-numbing spices.” The dish is on the menu in part to create awareness about global warming, because Kiribati, at only 8 to 12 feet above sea level, may become the first nation to be completely consumed by the ocean due to climate change.

“The purpose of food is nourishment, but not just for our bodies,” Bun says. “It’s important to understand that the ecosystem of our bodies is tied to the ecosystem of the entire planet. When we pollute one, we pollute the other.”

Photo by Dominic Perri

To promote healthier eating, the dishes at Miya’s that are healthiest for both people and the planet are deliberately the most affordable. Most cost less than five dollars, the price of a Big Mac meal—a reference point that is no coincidence and noted on the restaurant’s website.

Bun credits his parents for his passion for sustainable food and living. His Japanese mother, a nutritionist, opened Miya’s in 1982 and named it after Bun’s older sister. His Chinese father was a research doctor.

“They are the two people who have colored everything that I actually do in the cuisine of sushi,” he says. “They both had the philosophy that . . . it’s not enough to have a career. You have to have some positive impact on the world. I’m following that tradition.”

Chef Bun Lai of Miya’s Sushi grows food, but mostly forages for it, at his farm outside New Haven, Connecticut | Photo by Dominic Perri

Bun also credits the New Haven community, home to world-renowned Yale University, for influencing his cuisine. “I ended up collaborating over the years with, and being influenced by and educated by, some of the most interesting people who come from a vast array of life experiences and disciplines,” he says. “The sushi we do reflects that. It’s very multidisciplinary.”

Follow Chef Bun Lai here on twitter and facebook and keep up with Miya’s sushi restaurant here.

This article originally appeared in our September 2015 print edition.

Top photo by Dominic Perri Photography

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Some folks, like one of the main characters in New Hampshire writer Tim Horvath’s short story collection Understories, live life from the proverbial canopy, standing at the top and looking down and far afield at the vista. Others, Horvath included, prefer the understory.

In a forest, the understory comprises those shrubs and small trees that live beneath the larger trees, or canopy. Forced to make do with less light and higher humidity, these trees are often the scrappier characters in the play of forest life.

They also, to continue the character idea, are potentially the most interesting. Their vantage point is like no other. It is this perspective that drives Horvath in his writing.

“You know, Martin, it’s strange,” writes Professor Schoner to his friend, Martin Heidegger, in “The Understory.” “Trees have always defined the forest for me. I climbed in the canopy, because I thought that’s where the best, truest view was. But in the wake of the Storm of 1938, I find that the little plants of the understory have become very dear to me, dearer than I could have ever imagined.”

“That’s what underlies my work—the hidden stories,” Horvath says as we discuss Understories and his forthcoming first novel—about the conflicted relationship between two composers who first meet at music school in Hartford, Connecticut—in a quiet study room at, appropriately, the Hartford Public Library.

“For me, fiction is a way of accessing the sense that the universe is the possible, not just the actual. The possible and the plausible are equally active. So I’m more interested in the relationship of those two than the actual. I’m interested in what might have happened.” Horvath gives an example: what if Gauguin had gone to Greenland rather than Tahiti? “Would he have been a different artist or would he have Gauguinized wherever he went?” he ponders.

“I think I do believe that quote [by poet Muriel Rukeyser] that ‘the universe is made of stories, not of atoms,’” Horvath adds. “Stories are how we construct, how we give our lives form, shape, and purpose. They provide maps to help us find those things.”

“The Understory” illustrates another key driver in Horvath’s writing: he is an experiential writer. He took a forestry class that in part prompted the story, which is about a German professor of forestry. He has also taken up the trumpet because one of the characters in his novel in progress plays the trumpet.

Understories Cover | Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press | Published Nov 24, 2012

He moved to New Hampshire in 2003 to get his Master of Fine Arts at the University of New Hampshire. He lives with his wife, Mary Ann Cappiello, and their 10-year-old daughter, Ella, and the location figures large in his writing. “I love the role landscape can play in writing,” he says. “It can be more than a backdrop. It can be an integral character, an intimate device.”

Horvath grew up surrounded by writing. He lived in Bloomington, Indiana, until he was nine. His father was an editor at Indiana University Press. “One of our favorite family stories is about my father having breakfast with [Latin American writer Jorge Luis] Borges,” he says. “I was not aware this was a big deal. I totally missed the significance of it.”

When his parents divorced, Horvath moved with his mother and brother to Yonkers, New York. That’s where Horvath first started writing. “I had some great teachers who really encouraged that,” he says, noting his first “work” was about the move from Indiana to New York. “That was the big adventure in my life at that point.” Horvath loved fantasy as a genre, so another of his first “books” was “The Adventures of Peter Chesapeake.” “I hand wrote it, all six volumes,” he says. “It was a cross between [The Chronicles of] Narnia and The Lord of the Rings.”

Horvath says he identified as a writer in junior high and high school. Being a day student from Yonkers in Rye Country Day School, a tony private school, left him feeling a bit isolated. “It was a strange experience for me,” he says.

Some terrific English teachers helped make the road a little smoother, he says, citing Carol Lichtenfeld and Morrow Jones in particular. “We forged a real bond,” he says of Jones. “He taught an amazing creative writing class. We subscribed to The New Yorker. I didn’t really appreciate it at the time, but I was reading late [Raymond] Carver’s most successful stories.

“We were always engaged in these experiments,” Horvath continues. “One week an absurdist play, one week a poetic form like the sestina. I got into the habit really early of thinking of variety as being at the core of what one could hope for in writing rather than settling into any one thing.”

When Horvath arrived at Vassar College, though, he didn’t feel accepted as a writer there. “Vassar had a subculture of writers who seemed well established,” he says. “I didn’t feel a part of that.”

Instead he focused on philosophy, which he also studied in high school. “It really had a profound impact on me,” he says. “I put writing on the side burner. I still loved English and literature, but I figured if I don’t take philosophy I’ll never understand.” Ultimately, he majored in Philosophy and minored in English.

Horvath taught high school English after graduation, which left little time for personal writing. After a few years, however, he realized he missed writing, so he began taking some classes at The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. “It felt like this wonderful indulgence, having someone talk about my work,” he says.

It was a summer at Bread Loaf School of English in Middlebury, Vermont, and a short story class with writer David Huddle that finally brought Horvath to add the word “writer” to his personal description. “For a final project, I asked him if I could do a creative paper,” Horvath says. “He granted permission, and that dubbed me a writer in a very miniscule way. So it was very gradual.”

Today—at least in the summer, when he is off from his teaching job at the New Hampshire Institute of Art— Horvath writes 1,000 words every day. As with all writing, some days go better than others. Taking notes for his novel in progress while listening to music recently, for instance, was a relative breeze. “I felt like my hand could barely keep up with my mind.” But plot—that’s often trickier. “I feel like I can write sentences well. I feel confident about my sentence-to-sentence ability,” he says. “I see novelists who are really comfortable with plot. That’s the biggest challenge. I like someone who can tell a great story, and I like someone who can tell it in gorgeous sentences.”

The working title of Tim Horvath’s new book, his first “official” novel, is The Spinal Descent. It’s about two composers who become roommates while in music school in Hartford, Connecticut. They spend a few years after college in a competitive, but still amicable, relationship. One of them, Leonard, is more avant-garde, while his friend/frenemy is more commercially successful. Ultimately they have a falling out. “Leonard’s people skills are not great,” Horvath says. Circumstances bring them back together later in life, and their reunion is the basis of the novel. Horvath chose this excerpt to give us a sense of how Leonard speaks. “I wanted something that would capture the voice,” he says, noting it’s written in close third person.

*   *   *   *   *

He’d saved every scrap of printed matter with his name from over the years. The first article, which came when he was still a college student, when he could fancy himself a kind of phenom, he’d sliced brazenly out of the Hartford Courant with a razor blade. This became his tradition thereafter. In his best years, his roaring late 20s, the paper clip holding them all together became splayed. He called them the foie gras years, the commissions and the performances and the recordings coming in a glut, one felt in the liver, as he was wined and dined and treated a bit like a goose himself. The thirties turned lean, though. He’d always figured he’d outgrow that first clip, but it had proved more than adequate for the task, and the clippings began to fade, the paper turning the yellow-brown of drought grass. One razor blade, one clip. Nothing to slice, except . . . but he wasn’t that despondent. It was a phase. His life’s second movement. Maybe it was what was needed. And so he awaited the third movement eagerly, anxiously.

In that single clip were the screeds, the glowing homages that missed the mark but which he’d take anyway, and everything in between. In interviews, he could be pithy and remorseless, but he spoke for a greater cause, Music, and if he had to tear down a couple of peers along the way, well, it was necessary, radiation trained on a tumor before it could spread. But when he got out of the hospital and went through the folder, a new sensation spoked through his chest that he could only think of as the tympani of mortality. He wondered whether he’d overdone it at times. He’d torn apart raftloads of “composeurs.” They knew how to manipulate sound but had “perhaps watched too many videos” (two was too many) and could not distinguish between music that was mere glaze and the meat itself. Music was the meat. It should have been. It should have been the thing that other things were built around, slathered over.

Follow Tim Horvath online and on twitter.

This article originally appeared in our October 2015 Print issue.

Top image author Tim Horvath | Photo by Anthony Grassetti

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MATRIX was first.

Housed in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, MATRIX was the first gallery space in a traditional art museum dedicated to a changing series of contemporary art exhibitions. It is an idea that has since been replicated by more than 50 museums across America since MATRIX launched in 1975.

MATRIX has also been home to the first solo exhibitions for many of the world’s most important contemporary artists: Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, and Gerhard Richter to name just a very few. All told, more than 160 emerging artists have been exhibited to date.

“It was considered groundbreaking,” says Patricia Hickson, the museum’s curator of contemporary art. “Most encyclopedic museums never had exhibits with contemporary art at that time. It was not part of the canon. This was the first time putting contemporary art in dialogue with the storied collections of the Wadsworth Atheneum.”

(Top and Above photo) An Andy Warhol exhibition in the MATRIX gallery of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in 1979.

Andrea Miller-Keller was there from the beginning when then-Atheneum Director James Elliot started conceptualizing the idea. She wrote the National Endowment for the Arts grant that enabled the idea to become a reality.  

“Back then, contemporary art had no secular place in any art museum,” Miller-Keller says. “[MATRIX] was that bridge between a traditional art museum and a desire to share contemporary ideas.”

Miller-Keller ultimately became the first MATRIX curator, a position she held for 23 years. In that time, she considered helping the public to understand contemporary art as one of her main functions. “Traditional art is always soothing and makes you feel elevated,” she says, “and contemporary art is often challenging and makes people feel confused. My number-one job was to dispel the confusion.”

To that end, a MATRIX exhibit has always been multifaceted. Miller-Keller made sure exhibits included publications and handouts as well as gallery talks. “No one should walk into a room and feel lesser because they don’t get it,” she says. “My mission was always to show the toughest work but to offer the public some explanations.”

Photos Courtesy of The Wadsworth Atheneum

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Berkshires composer William Perry has made a life’s work composing for silent films. The Museum of Modern Art’s music director and composer-in-residence for 12 years, Perry spent that time composing and performing music for the museum’s extensive silent film collection.

“I created a large number of scores for silent films and performed them on piano in the old tradition,” he says of his time there, noting silent film star Lillian Gish was a good friend. “I happened along when there was a revival of interest [in silent films] in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. It was a happy coming-together at the right time.”

The Farmington Valley Symphony Orchestra will perform a work he composed for three silent film shorts, called The Silent Years:

Charlie Chaplin

Rhapsodies for Orchestra and Piano. While the orchestra plays, the films — The Beloved Rogue featuring John Barrymore, Blood & Sand with Rudolph Valentino, and The Gold Rush starring Charlie Chaplin — will be screened. Pianist Nadine Shank is the soloist.

“They represent a kind of different challenge,” Perry says of this composition. “The Beloved Rogue with its Middle Ages setting requires fanfares. Blood & Sand has the Andalusian bullfighting thing. Then The Gold Rush combines humor with pathos. Poor Charlie left alone on New Year’s Eve. They’re different enough that it’s exiting to write different styles of music to capture all the color and atmosphere.”

Perry, who in his post MOMA life, among other things, produced an Emmy Award-winning TV series, The Silent Years, that starred Orson Welles and Gish, is a font of silent-film facts.

John Barrymore

Composing for silent films is unique, Perry says. “Because they’re silent, your musical score — piano or orchestra — represents a number of things. It provides mood and period and color. That’s the same thing a modern sound film does, but a silent film score is also providing sound effects because there are none on the screen.

“You’re also trying to catch the mood of jokes or sad moments,” he continues. “You hope you can get there and assist, in a sense, punching home the stuff that’s supposed to be funny and at the same time underscoring the stuff that’s supposed to be more tragic. You’re the only source of sound for the audience.”

Initially, Perry says, much of silent film music was improvised, with pianists following cue sheets for key scenes. “They learned to play danger music, chase music, clown music — cues to drop in and fit the mood.”

Later, in the ‘20s, scores became the norm, Perry says. Pit orchestras performing live music, as the FVSO will do in its performance, were the standard during the silent-film era. Perry notes, for instance, that movie houses in Hartford, Connecticut, likely had five or six musicians during film screenings, while the Roxy in New York City might have an 80-piece orchestra.

“Typically there was more than one score for a film,” Perry says. “Chaplin was a composer himself, so later on he did revisit The Gold Rush and write some music for it. There were different scores for the better-known silent films.”

Rudolph Valentino

Perry is not just a silent film composer. After his MOMA stint, in the ‘70s, he produced a poetry series for PBS called Anyone for Tennyson? It starred, among others, Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Claire Bloom, William Shatner, and Vincent Price. He also produced and composed the scores for the Peabody Award-winning Mark Twain series of PBS feature films. His Broadway musical, Wind in the Willows, which starred Nathan Lane, won him Tony nominations for music and lyrics.

At 85 and still composing — he just finished a chamber piece for viola and piano when we chatted — Perry describes himself as “somewhere between composing and decomposing. My goal is to get up there with Elliott Carter, who was 102 and composing right up to the end.”

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For the uninitiated, Moth StorySlams (and their NPR radio component, The Moth Radio Hour) are events where storytellers — pros mixed in with just regular folks who throw their name in a hat — stand up and tell a story. It is old-school entertainment that harkens back to a time when digital didn’t exist.

Dicks, who lives in Newington, Connecticut, has become a grandmaster of sorts on the storytelling circuit in just four short years. Since winning his first slam in 2011, he’s participated in 37 Moth StorySLAMS in New York City, winning 18 of them. He has also competed in 13 Moth GrandSLAM championships, winning three times.

Today, when he’s not writing a novel (he’s written four, the most recent of which is The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs), Dicks runs SpeakUp, a Hartford-based organization devoted to promoting the art of personal storytelling and to teaching people how to identify and tell their stories.

Here are a few of Dicks’ tips about the art of storytelling:

What makes a good storyteller?

• “You can tell almost immediately. There is a pacing that storytellers understand. There are people that speak like a machine gun — every word is the same as the word before. That person probably is not going to be as effective.”
• They ease into the story.
• “I usually know when I feel the storyteller seeing the things they’re telling us about, coming as close to reliving that thing as possible. I can’t teach how to emotionally reconnect with the moment they’re trying to share. Most often on stage I’m back in that time. My vision is no longer the audience but what I’m seeing in the story. If it’s emotional, I’m seeing it again.” He gives an example. He was in a car accident when he was 17 and almost died. “Every moment, I have trouble getting through a certain part of that story. Every time I can see that same thing, it’s like I’m right back there. You get that sense from a storyteller.”
• “You can hear the cutting to the bone versus the extraneous information. You hear the leanness of a story. You can sense it almost immediately.

Top image: Matthew Dicks | Photo Courtesy of Matthew Dicks

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The rest of the story in Buyer and Cellar, playwright Jonathan Tolins makes clear in his playbill note to theatergoers, is fiction.

But what fiction it is. Tolins imagines that Streisand hires a chronically underemployed actor to play storekeeper for her periodic visits to her collections. The resulting one-man play is tour-de-force as the actor — in the Hartford company’s case the very talented Tom Lenk — takes us into the cellar. We watch as his initial assumptions about the eccentricity of having a mini-mall in a basement grow into an appreciation of the actress as a result of her visits. It is a journey that is simultaneously hysterical and poignant. In addition to portraying Streisand — Lenk does not impersonate the star so much as suggest her, which is far more subtle and effective — he plays his jealous, frustrated boyfriend. Barry, among other characters.

Tom Lenk in Buyer & Cellar | Photos by Lanny Nagler

The post The Things She Purchased appeared first on Take Magazine.

Kate Clark, Licking the Plate, 2014. Kudu hide and horns, foam, clay, thread, pins, rubber eyes, wood, plaster, paint, and painted backdrop, 10’ x 10’ x 4’. Lent by the artist

No longer delegated to dioramas in natural history museums, taxidermy is an art form now featured in contemporary art museums around the world. In Dead Animals, or the curious occurrence of taxidermy in contemporary art, which also includes a symposium on taxidermy, 18 artists provide their unique take on this changing art form.

Thomas Grunfeld, Misfit (Penguin/Peacock), 2005. Taxidermy, 23 5/8 x 9 7/8 x 11 7/8. Collection Jan Peter Kern, Germany. Photo: Lothar Schnepf, Cologne. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Featured artists include Kate Clark, whose work is the focus of a National Geographic video that debuted this summer; Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan; New Bedford, Massachusetts, native Mark Dion; Nicholas Galanin; German artist Thomas Grunfeld, known for a series called Misfits that features sculptures made from taxidermied animals;Damien Hirst; Karen Knorr; French artist Annette Messager; British artists Polly Morganand Angela Singer; Deborah Sengi; Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir in collaboration with Mark Wilson; Richard Barnes; Jules Greenberg; Sarah Cusimano Miles; Richard Ross; and Hiroshi Sugimoto. In addition to sculptures, the exhibit includes photography.

Polly Morgan Gannet, 2014. Taxidermy gannet, cremated bird remains 50 1/2 x 38 1/2 x 1. Lent by the artist

Snæbjörnsdóttir & Wilson, Somerlyton from nanoq: flat out and bluesome, 2001–2005. Archival pigment print, 24 5/8” x 24 5/8”. Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Meg and Earl Tarble.

Mark Dion, Concrete Jungle (Mammalia), 1993. Mixed media, including taxidermy cat, opossum, squirrel and found objects, 53 x 139 x 54 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

All photos courtesy David Winton Bell Gallery

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While many have heard of the Rhode Island School of Design, many more may not realize that RISD, as it’s known, has a museum. Called, not surprisingly, the RISD Museum, it boasts a collection of about 100,000 objects, including paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, costume, furniture, and other works of art and design from all over the world, from ancient times to the latest in contemporary art.

Works (L-R) | Now I’ve Got Worry (Mask and L-Bar), 1997–1998 [L-Bar not pictured]; Chair (Noir), 1999; We Pass But We Never Touch, 2003 [mobile]; Last Hours of Evening Light, 2015; Ventilation Grills (for a house in the woods), 2010 [wall, far right] Works (L-R) | Now I’ve Got Worry (Mask and L-Bar), 1997–1998 [L-Bar not pictured]; Chair (Noir), 1999; We Pass But We Never Touch, 2003 [mobile]; Last Hours of Evening Light, 2015; Ventilation Grills (for a house in the woods), 2010 [wall, far right]

Works (L-R) | The Breeze in the Branches, 2013; Now I’ve Got Worry (Storage unit) 1, 1997

Works (L-R) | When Now is Night, 2002 [wallpaper]; The Sun-Comprehending Glass, 2013; Fear Meets the Soul, 2008 [mobile]; And Beyond It, The Deep Blue Air, 2013

There’s no better time to make a potentially inaugural visit than before Jan. 31, which is when the exhibit of Scottish artist Martin Boyce — his first solo exhibit at an American museum — is due to come down. The exhibit, called When Now is Night, is a retrospective of sorts and features works from various media through Boyce’s career. A group of rarely exhibited early photographs, for instance, join the arguable highlight of the exhibit (a piece that provides the exhibit’s name) — Boyce’s recreation of his two-part installation “When Now is Night.”

A preeminent contemporary artist, Boyce is known for his sculptures, photographs, and large installations. A winner of the Tate’s Turner Prize in 2011, Boyce often takes potentially familiar shapes — phone booths, for instance, or chain link fences or trash bins — and gives them new life in other breathtaking forms.

Top Image (L-R) | Between the Airport and the Beach, 2013 [background, far left]; When Now is Night, 2002 [lights, cabinet]. | All Art by Martin Boyce | Photos courtesy of the RISD Museum

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The Wadsworth Atheneum is more than “just” America’s oldest continuously operating public art museum. It’s also home to a ton of terrific film series. This weekend’s free — yes, free — screening of Before Stonewall and Stonewall Rising is just one example.

Still from Before Stonewall, 1984, Directed by Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg

These two Stonewall films, shown back to back, examine this seminal moment in gay history through two different approaches. Before Stonewall, a documentary, explores the history of the American gay and lesbian community back to the 1920s. Stonewall Uprising tells the story of the infamous police raid at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 that led to a three-day riot and launched the gay rights movement.

Andy Warhol, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1975. Synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas, in 2 parts, Collection Stephanie Seymour, Courtesy The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Conn. Art © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Be sure you leave time before or after to view the current exhibit these films are meant to complement: Warhol & Mapplethorpe: Guise & Dolls. In it, iconic artists Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe shine a light on New York in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibit includes the artists’ portraits of each other, self-portraits, and stylistic portraits of others addressing role playing and gender roles. It is the first dual museum exhibit of these two visionary artists.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, 1975. Gelatin silver print, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, N.Y. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

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Attention jazz fans within driving distance of Brattleboro, Vermont. Critically acclaimed guitarist Bobby Broom is leaving the Windy City, aka Chicago, and coming to the Vermont Jazz Center this weekend. It’s his only East Coast gig on this trip.

Winner of DownBeat magazine’s critics’ poll as Best Guitarist three of the last four years, Broom plays regularly with Sonny Rollins, joining him on tour and on five of his albums. He was also a favorite of Art Blakey. Broom will be joined at his performance by Dennis Carroll on bass and Makaya McCraven on drums.

Broom’s performance will feature work from his newest release, My Shining Hour, which has received some rave reviews to date. The New York Times’ Nate Chinen called the album “…among the most satisfying jazz guitar albums likely to emerge this year (2014)”, while DownBeat magazine’s John Corbett gave it four stars. Broom, he noted, “is the full monty: ultra-refined timing and tone, continuous flow of ideas, a touch of grease, a treat for the connoisseur.”

Photo by Todd Winters

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