Liberation Trio

Elijah J. Thomas, Alberto Oliart, Skyler Hagner

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

Skyler Hagner (he/him) is a composer, arranger, woodwind player, and educator based in Inwood, New York. Originally from Guilford CT, Skyler holds a Master’s of Music in Jazz Composition and Arranging from William Paterson University and a Bachelor’s of Music in Jazz Performance from Temple University. A low reed specialist, he can frequently be found performing on the baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, and contra-alto clarinet. As a composer, Skyler’s original work explores the intersection of composition and improvisation, with an emphasis on creative mid and large sized ensembles. Living in the liminal space between structure and spontaneity, his music frequently features pairings of performers, and the juxtaposition of soloists in various settings. Skyler is the recipient of a Jazz Road Tours Grant and has been commissioned by the Guilford Performing Arts Festival for his 2021 suite: [Invisible Cities] Humanity, Memory, and Decay.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elijah J. Thomas (he/him/his) is a Black Philadelphia-born, Harlem-based multi-instrumentalist, educator and composer/experimentalist. He has studied improvisation with Dick Oatts, Tim Warfield, Jr. and Walter Bell, and composition with Dr. Cynthia Folio, Kevin Rodgers, and Dr. Maurice Wright. Elijah creates “enuff music”: music for Black healing, being, and spiritual transcendence. Elijah has held numerous teaching positions and has led four recorded projects: enuff music, vol. i (EP, released with Off Latch Press), Our Search (LP), Three Contemplations for Jason Moran (EP) and The Unity of Sound with The NeW Quintet (LP). Elijah is Musical Director of the global street band performance organization HONK NYC, whose mission is to “make events that reclaim, reuse, and redefine public space and connect communities through music-making, pageantry, audience participation, and education.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alberto Oliart (he/him) is an artist, drummer, activist and Starbucks employee. He grew up in Mexico, where he studied Visual Arts in ENPEG La Esmeralda. He then went on to complete a degree in Jazz Studies at William Paterson University. His creative work attempts to formulate critical and emancipatory interpretations of hegemonic social relations, events and cultural products through intervention, recontextualization and association. He also likes making arrangements of revolutionary songs.

© 2023

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Liberation Trio: a culture-connecting, sonically fluid, interactive and experimental musical collective focused on achieving a state of liberation through artmaking

● What are the purposes for which we create music?
● What values do we hold as a collective?
● What is our intention through public artmaking?

Freedom / expression / equality / underrepresented voices

Interaction / experimentation / dialogue with art and site specific spaces around us

Free searching / tradition - dialogue with the elders and their music. Performing portions of their work

Culture makes human connection, empathy, and mutual identification possible across time and space, and thus it holds much political potential. Cultural products of struggling people from the past materialize them and their struggles for us, makes them palpable. So do cultural products from other places in the world. We are a vessel for those connections by playing our own music and the music of others. This conception of culture is necessarily antagonistic to one that tends toward monopolization and homogenization under the profit motive.

Action with the intention to exist wholly within a reality where oppressive ideology and the systems that perpetuate oppressive ideology have no function and purpose – this is to liberate. To cultivate this state through sound and vibration, to migrate those who listen from the current state of oppression to a mode of relief from oppression, is liberation. There is music that exists that is representative of this state of being, and music that has yet to exist that will intend to bring about this state of being. As we create, we attempt to liberate ourselves and others. When we achieve that state and can maintain it, all of us together, we’ll know, because there is no going back.

© 2023

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