Renowned jazz composer and percussionist Adam Rudolph hailed by the Boston Globe as the producer of "world jazz of the highest caliber" will join the Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble for its fall concert, "Global Jazz: World Rhythms," which will take place Saturday night at the Hopkins Center. In addition to performing several original compositions by Rudolph, the 22-member Barbary Coast, directed by Don Glasgo, plans to play several songs by contemporary composers, including Peter Apfelbaum, Yusef Lateef and Sun Ra.
The ensemble will also be joined by two guest artists: Moroccan percussionist Brahim Fribgane and keyboardist and percussionist James Hurt.
Rudolph who will both conduct and play percussion along with the ensemble has been a celebrated jazz musician for over 30 years and is particularly known for his role in pioneering the blending the sounds of jazz and world music. In an interview with The Dartmouth, however, he hesitated to delimit his style.
"I don't know what jazz' or world music' means," Rudolph said. "I don't think too much about categories or labels. I work with individuals and musical elements like sound, color and motion and the feelings you can project through music."
Rudolph traced his love of music to his childhood growing up on Chicago's South Side. He took piano lessons from a young age, but said he was most motivated by the street musicians who played in his neighborhood, which inspired him to work on his technique in Afro-Haitian and Afro-Cuban drumming patterns.
"I was younger than everybody, but they let me join in, and I was really good at it right away," Rudolph said. "The biggest thing I learned from them was that musical technique serves as the expression of deep feeling and that you could do anything you could imagine to do in music if you had the courage to do it."
After earning a degree from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music in Ohio, Rudolph returned to Chicago, where he drove a cab until he earned enough money to journey to Ghana. There, he experimented with combining African and jazz music, as well as with traditional Indian instruments, such as the tabla drum.
"[Going to Ghana] was a life-transforming experience," Rudolph said. "I saw clearly how the cosmology of culture is the seed of musical expression. Music doesn't just come from nothing it comes from something greater than music."
Rudolph has also created two of his own ensembles. In 1992, he founded Adam Rudolph's Moving Pictures, and in 2001, he founded Go: Organic Orchestra.
The Organic Orchestra performs music from "composed, non-linear score[s]" in experimental ways, dynamically performing the pieces based on Rudolph's improvisational conducting, according to the group's website.
Rudolph planned to use the same technique in his work with Barbary Coast, he said.
According to Rudolph, the concept behind the Organic Orchestra was "the idea of mentorship."
"I wanted to mentor younger musicians who were interested in music and generate an ensemble where everybody could be welcome," he said.
He brought this concept to New York City, as well as to several universities worldwide. On Saturday, he will bring his idea of the "Organic Orchestra" to Dartmouth.
Glasgo said he learned of Rudolph through a mutual friend Joe Bowie, a member of Adam Rudolph's Moving Pictures and was drawn to the artist's skill in "working with improvisation in a large ensemble."
That ability is evident in the reactions of students in Barbary Coast, who have been rehearsing with Rudolph all week.
"Rudolph's music is unlike anything I've ever experienced as a musician or a listener," bass trombonist and tuba player Paul Finkelstein '13 said. "The freedom I've experienced while working with [Rudolph] is liberating as a musician. It's improvisation on the most personal level, yet even while everyone is doing their own thing, we still manage to come together to produce one group sound."
Rudolph, who reciprocated the students' enthusiasm, said he has enjoyed watching the students go through the improvisational creative process.
"I've been really impressed and inspired by the students in this ensemble, by the fact that they're open and interested in different creative processes and finding their inner voices on their instruments," he said.
This improvisational spirit may help audiences put aside any preconceived notions of jazz and world music Rudolph's professed main hope for the concert, he said.
"I hope that instead of a coat check, the audience gets a preconception-check, so they can leave their preconceptions at the door and listen to the feelings in the music," he said.
The concert will take place Saturday at 8 p.m. in Spaulding Auditorium.
