Mark Dresser

Solo Bass Performance

Please RSVP via email studio@galeriezurcher.com to attend

Tickets can be purchased at the door.
Admission is $20. (CASH ONLY)
All proceeds go to the artists.

At Zürcher Gallery
33 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012

Dresser’s captivating new solo album Tines of Change expands the sonic possibilities of the bass with innovations and imagination

“[Mark Dresser is] a bassist who is one of the great instrumental forces in recent American jazz outside the mainstream." – Ben Ratliff, The New York Times

 " Dresser uses the bow like Picasso used the brush: to refract and recast certain realities and to create completely new ones." – Robert Bush, San Diego Reader

 “I think of the bass as an orchestra,” writes San Diego-based bassist/composer Mark Dresser in the liner notes for his breathtaking new solo album, Tines of Change. If anything, this is an understatement in regards to the multi-dimensional sonic possibilities that Dresser conjures from the instrument. Through his singular combination of improvisational artistry and innovative adaptations, Dresser seems to discover orchestras within orchestras, crosscurrents of harmonic and multiphonic inspiration that engage in captivating and entrancingly beautiful dialogues.

Dresser has devoted a lifetime of research and performance to expanding the vocabulary of the bass, experimenting with extended techniques as well as with the physical properties of the instrument itself. Intensive though these studies have been, the results are always far from esoteric. He is renowned as one of creative music’s most expressive and inventive artists, whether in his expansive solo playing or in collaboration with such acclaimed collaborators as John Zorn, Henry Threadgill, Gerry Hemingway, Myra Melford, Joe Lovano, Dave Douglas, Tim Berne, Jane Ira Bloom, Dawn Upshaw, Ray Anderson, and countless others. His trio with “hyperpiano” player Denman Maroney and flutist Matthias Ziegler features three musicians who take similarly expansive approaches to their instruments. 

Due out May 5, 2023 via Pyroclastic Records, Tines of Change features a dozen new explorations performed on unconventional four- and five-string basses crafted for Dresser by the Colorado-based bassist and luthier Kent McLagan. The album’s title refers to those basses’ most striking feature, an array of metal tines affixed to a secondary bridge. Like the strings these tines can be plucked or bowed, offering a variety of sounds from the percussive to the ethereal that adds sounds resembling both an African mbira and the stroked rods invented by composer Robert Erickson that Dresser employed on his 2017 release Modicana.

Mark Dresser
Mark Dresser is a Grammy nominated, internationally renowned bass player, improviser, composer, and interdisciplinary collaborator. At the core of his music is an artistic obsession and commitment to expanding the sonic, musical, and expressive possibilities of the contrabass. He has recorded over 150 albums. From 1985 to 1994, he was a member of Anthony Braxton’s Quartet, which recorded nine albums and was the subject of Graham Locke’s book Forces in Motion (Da Capo). He has also performed and recorded the music of Ray Anderson, Jane Ira Bloom, Tim Berne, Anthony Davis, Dave Douglas, Osvaldo Golijov, Gerry Hemingway, Bob Ostertag, Joe Lovano, Roger Reynolds, Henry Threadgill, Dawn Upshaw, and John Zorn. Since 2007 he has been deeply involved in telematic music performance and education. He was awarded a 2015 Shifting Foundation Award and 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award. He is Distinguished Professor of Music at University of California, San Diego.