Grammy-Award Winner Rinde Eckert's TIME IS OUR OWN Premieres At Billboard

BWW MusicWorld.com
Music News Desk
August 23, 2018

Grammy-award winning composer, musician, performer, writer and director Rinde Eckert's new single "Time is Our Own" premieres at Billboard with a feature interview. Read the interview/share the track HERE. The single appears on Eckert's most personal album to date, The Natural World, out August 24 via National Sawdust Tracks.

In support of The Natural World, Eckert will perform at National Sawdust in New York City on August 26. To purchase tickets click HERE.

Having collaborated on numerous highly acclaimed recordings over the course of his varied and celebrated career, The Natural World marks Eckert's first completely solo album, in that all vocals and instruments (including guitars, piano, electronic keyboards/samples, accordion, South American wood flute, hand percussion, tenor banjo, dobro ukulele, banjo ukulele, shruti box and penny whistle) are provided by Eckert himself. Following a two-month, cross-country journey playing solo concerts, he entered the studio with longtime collaborator and producer Lee Townsend (Bill Frisell, John Scofield, Kelly Joe Phelps) and created a record that explores where the classical meets the vernacular and the earthly meets the spiritual-all with an eye toward offering empathy and vision in polarized times.

Grammy-award winner Rinde Eckert’s “Time is Our Own” premieres at Billboard—album out tomorrow, August 24

Rock NYC
Written by admin
August 23, 2018

“…[Eckert] finds vivifying parallels between the theological quest of one man and the theatrical quest to capture and illuminate life.”—The New York Times

“Eckert is incomparable in making the mind matter in modern opera and performance art…”—Los Angeles Times

“His resonant, magnetic voice is even more flexible, soaring in a sweet tenor or angelic falsetto…”—San Francisco Chronicle

Grammy-award winning composer, musician, performer, writer and director Rinde Eckert’s new single “Time is Our Own” premieres at Billboard with a feature interview. Read the interview/share the track HERE. The single appears on Eckert’s most personal album to date, The Natural World, out August 24 via National Sawdust Tracks.

In support of The Natural World, Eckert will perform at National Sawdust in New York City on August 26. To purchase tickets click HERE.

Rinde Eckert Premieres 'Time Is Our Own' From One-Man Band Album 'The Natural World'

billboard
By Gary Graff
August 23, 2018

Rinde Eckert has a long and distinguished career on the stage and in the studio, which has included a slew of awards, including a Grammy, and collaborations with the Kronos quartet, Brian Eno and opera soprano Renee Fleming. Now Eckert is stepping out on his own with his first ever truly solo album, The Natural World, whose "Time Is Our Own" premieres exclusively below.

"I just never felt like I was ready to do it -- and then I was," Eckert tells Billboard. His longtime collaborator and The Natural World producer Lee Townsend had been pushing him in this direction for a while, Eckert says, and winning the inaugural Doris Duke Artist Award, which included "a lot of money" earmarked for "audience development" helped provide an impetus for the project.

Jenkins and collaborators immerse the audience in ‘Toward 45’

San Francisco Chronicle
By Claudia Bauer
May 18, 2018

There are work-in-progress showings, and then there is Margaret Jenkins Dance Company’s “Toward 45.” Technically, it’s a casual salon where celebrated choreographer Jenkins, her 10 dancers and longtime collaborators like musician Paul Dresher and poet Michael Palmer can share ideas they’re developing for a celebratory performance next season, the company’s 45th anniversary.

In reality, “Toward 45,” which opened a three-night stand at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance on Thursday, May 17, is a fully realized, up-close immersion in music, poetry, contemporary dance and theater.

It’s also the first time all of the collaborators — Jenkins, Palmer, Dresher, theater artist Rinde Eckert and scenic and lighting designer Alexander V. Nichols — have worked on the same piece since “The Gates (Far Away Near)” in 1993, though they’ve collaborated in smaller configurations in the interim.

Review: ‘Iron & Coal’ at Strathmore

DC Metro Theater Arts
By John Stolenberg
May 5, 2018

The sheer magnitude of the concert event was enough to inspire wonder and awe. More than 200 musicians packed the Strathmore stage and a balcony above—two orchestras, three choirs, a rock band—plus animated projections on a widescreen scrim and a stadium-scale light plot flooding the hall. For two nights only, Jeremy Schonfeld’s 2011 rock concept album Iron & Coal got mega-sized. The effect was gloriously spectacular and overwhelmingly beautiful—and also dramatically not quite focused.

Composer/lyricist Schonfeld created Iron & Coal as a tribute to his German Jewish father, Gustav Schonfeld, whose story is gripping: At the age of 10 he was sent to Auschwitz and survived along with his father until liberation. Then, reunited a year later with his mother, who also survived, Gustav grew up in the United States and became a renowned medical doctor, much lauded in his lifetime. (He died in 2011 on the very day his son’s Iron & Coal was mastered.) Portions of his autobiography, titled Absence of Closure, were incorporated into the concert program. He was “the first refuge kid from war to be bar mizvahed” at his synagogue in St. Louis (“The boy who lost his childhood becomes a man today”). He tells vividly of his post-traumatic nightmares. The snippets from Gustav’s memoir make one want to read more.

Review: My Lai massacre, 50 years later: Jonathan Berger's opera captures the madness

BY MARK SWED
MUSIC CRITIC
MARCH 11, 2018
LOS ANGELES TIMES

"Where in God's name is the medic?" the dying hospital patient demands. He's not asking for help for himself. He's frantically trying to save a boy's life. It's a scream, one of the important screams in American history, that has haunted him for 38 years.

Jonathan Berger's opera "My Lai" — written for the Kronos Quartet, tenor Rinde Eckert and Vân-Ánh Võ, a virtuoso player of traditional Vietnamese instruments — takes place during the last hallucinatory days of Hugh Thompson Jr. He was the U.S. Army helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War who flew over the massacre in My Lai. Above the fray, he could see the mass hysteria below that warped the minds of Charlie Company. Those men were infamously commanded to wipe out everything walking, crawling or growing. More than 500 civilians, mostly women, children and the elderly, were slaughtered. There was no evidence of Viet Cong activity.

Review: Kronos Quartet Revisits Vietnam Horror in ‘My Lai’

By James R. Oestreich
September. 28, 2017
The New York Times

You would like to think that a soldier who took a heroic stand against evil and managed to save at least a few lives amid a massacre could find peace of mind in his dying days. The creators of “My Lai,” a musical theater work given its premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday evening, suggest otherwise in the case of Hugh Thompson.

Vietnam is much in the air at the moment, thanks to the PBS documentary series “The Vietnam War,” by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. But as comprehensive as that survey is, it gives surprisingly cursory treatment to the massacre of more than 500 Vietnamese civilians by American troops in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. When it finally came to light, in November 1969, that mass killing proved pivotal in marshaling American fatigue and disgust with the war, which finally led to the withdrawal of troops in 1973.

Maine rivers don’t just flood, they inspire art

BDN Maine
Living
April 18, 2017

Patty Wight | Maine Public
Visiting artist Rinde Eckert (right) works with students during a rehearsal.

Students of theater, music, and art at the University of Southern Maine may share similar areas of creative interest, but they tend to focus on their own media. In the past few months, that’s changed.

The students have been collaborating on a theater production that explores how Maine’s waterways have shaped its history. The show, “Molded by the Flow,” opens Friday in Lewiston.

The name not only reflects the content of the show, it’s also a metaphor for how it was created. It’s what’s called devised theatre, where producers toss aside the typical predetermined script and instead form a show from improvisation and collaboration.

It’s an approach that senior Cameron Prescott, a major in music performance, was not used to.

“I was very, uh, apprehensive about the whole thing. As a performer, I like everything under control and prepared. It took me time to realize that this isn’t that,” he says.

Two visiting artists, Paul Dresher and Rinde Eckert, guided the students in creating the show, which is described as a “poetic, visual, and musical narrative” that explores the relationship between Maine’s waterways and its history. Eckert says it’s about how streams shaped the landscape and formed rivers, the power of which was harnessed by mills, and how that water flowed out to the ocean, which has its own power, and created centers of culture and community through its ports.

Rinde's writing on The Kennedy Center

The Kennedy Center
Just did my debut at the Kennedy Center in the intimate and handsome Family Theater. I was gratified to see the place almost full. I was the first concert in the series (curated by the remarkable Renée Fleming), and, perhaps, the farthest out of the five (Billy Childs, Jane Monheit, Leslie Odom Jr., Alan Cumming, and me). So I felt I needed to usher the audience into my world with care. Started off with my classical male alto at its most medieval, headed into something operatic but on a folk-like melody, then picked up a foot-long section of galvanized pipe and started blowing a rhythmic riff, and singing my version of the old spiritual Gospel Plough.
We were far afield now, so I brought them home again with a new arrangement of Black is the Color with a synth accompaniment, and a French melodie from 1913 by Reynaldo Hahn on a poem by Théophile de Viau, singing and doing my best impression of an accompanist at the same time. I followed that with a somewhat skewed (and, I think, touching) arrangement of Nun Danket Alle Gott. Then I turned to the guitars and ukuleles. The audience seemed up for the adventure, so we just sailed along after that, moving from genre to genre and instrument to instrument until my hour and a half was up. Ended with a thing called Prayer, a kind of piano chorale under a falsetto melody. Here are the words: 
When out of ignorance we forget how alike we are
Have mercy, have mercy upon us
When out of greed we forget to care for one another
Have mercy, have, mercy upon us
When out of fear we forget what makes us human
Have mercy , have mercy upon us
Let us pray for a day when we may understand
Let us pray for a day when we may be a wiser people