![]() We thought that doing a band that had all these really diverse sounds would be really exciting. He teaches the Electronic Music Ensemble at the University of Michigan. Steve is one of the few people who plays MicroMoog and some of the other more primitive synthesizers. Geoff and I became really good friends with him and started talking about what Steve does. I heard him playing and I really loved his music. We must have gone through there three or four times before we started playing together. It's a pretty rare thing to have Coltrane and Sun Ra as part of a church service. ![]() I met Steve and he was doing all this amazing stuff like the jazz service. They also have a performance series and so we played at that performance series. They have an amazing jazz Mass, where he plays Sun Ra and Coltrane compositions for the church service. We were on a tour of the northeast and the mid-west, a circuit I've been doing for a couple of years, and Steve Rush, in addition to being the professor of new music at the University of Michigan, books shows at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, Mich. Tom Abbs: I was on tour with Geoff Mann and Steve Swell: the New York BrassWood Trio. Each player is a multi instrumentalist and what characterizes the band for me is the continual switching between instruments, evoking a sound much bigger than a trio. Rush's use of synthesizers has provoked comparisons with Sun Ra, but that is just one aspect of the group. Living as a Creative Musician in New York CityĪll About Jazz: One of your current projects is the collective Yuganaut with Steve Rush and Geoff Mann.Creative Improvised Music and the Downtown Scene.The unification of these different streams has reached an apogee in the co-operative trio Yuganaut, whose first disc is out on ESP. As if this wasn't enough, Abbs has become general manager of a resurgent ESP Disk, overseeing reissues of the classic catalogue alongside an array of mouthwatering new releases. He boasts a distinctive compositional conception manifest through his adventurous Frequency Response grouping, increasingly allied to a personal visual lexicon. An accomplished instrumentalist on tuba as well as bass, he has collaborated with downtown stalwarts Daniel Carter, Steve Swell, Cooper-Moore, Jemeel Moondoc, Assif Tsahar, Andrew Lamb and Warren Smith among many others. Bassist, composer and film-maker Tom Abbs has enlivened not only the ensembles in which he has played, but also the New York City free jazz scene with his brand of musical activism, through the Jump Arts Foundation.
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