Two new albums (Thollem McDonas). Click For Infos. Ciao, today I sent two new solo piano albums of mine to you.
i included a short paragraph here quickly explaining my vision of these albums, as well as my biography.
Much thanks, thollem
http://www.thollem.com
These two albums are the 2nd and 3rd of my solo piano trilogy. Together the 3 albums represent very different approaches to much of the same material. The 1st album “Nuclear Bomb, Cave Painting” (Pax Recordings) is a studio recording primarily presenting many ideas without development incorporating much silence throughout (Pax Recordings released this last year). The 2nd album “Poor Stop Killing Poor” is a live recording in Detroit this past spring, the concert was played straight through without pause and with much improvisation. The 3rd album “Racing The Sun, Chasing The Sun” consists of the 1st half of two different live recordings from this past year welded on top of each other, woven in and out.
Thollem Mcdonas,pianist/vocalist/composer/improviser, recipient of the 2006 National Endowment of the Arts Meet The Composer grant, was born Feb. 23, 1967 in the San Francisco Bay Area of Irish and Cherokee descent. He is presently living in Prague. He began his musical training as a young child rigorously studying the keyboard repertoire of European composers from the renaissance to the 20th century. After graduating with degrees in both piano performance and composition he chose to become homeless for several years, opting to wander and live out of a backpack, rather than pursue a career as a concert pianist with a suit and tie. It is because of these dichotomies and rich, wildly disparate experiences that his music is so dynamic and appeals to such a wide variety of audiences.
His travels as a performer have covered much of the North American continent and Europe. He has performed extensively as a soloist as well with groups. He is a founding member of several innovative ensembles, and is responsible, in full or in part, for many albums of original music. In the past year he has toured Italy and logged 13,000 miles on the road throughout America. After the release of three albums in 2005, he is planning seven more this coming year.
Thollem has performed in theaters, art galleries, universities, elementary schools, concert halls, jazz clubs, rock clubs, festivals, warehouses, house concerts, streets, forests, the Shoshone Desert at the Nevada nuclear test site, on television, radio, in circuses, and riots. He has performed piano concertos with symphonies, played in many free improv groups, West African drumming troupes, and javanese gamelan ensembles, all the while working as an accompanist and a composer for opera and modern dance.
Currently Thollem mostly plays his own comprovisations which he calls post-classical circus punk world jazz free music, for people and everyone else. His music whispers/screams, “there are as many worlds in a life as there are lives in the world”.
