Cancelled | Walking Cliché & Tornasol Honors Ensemble Recital

A shared concert by two Honors Ensembles, representing the Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation departments. The NEC Honors Ensembles are selected each year by competitive audition for their extraordinary artistic accomplishment & commitment to working together.

Walking Cliché

The Walking Cliché Sextet goes all the way back to the Fall of 2018.

Late every night in the New England Conservatory practice rooms, students were practicing their rhythms, incomplete compositions, and improvisations either by themselves or together. Their inspirations ranged from jazz composers like Thelonius Monk, Andrew Hill, Vijay Iyer, and Steve Lehman to classical composers such as György Ligeti and Olivier Messiaen.

In March of 2019, the leader/bassist of the group, SeaJun Kwon finished writing his four-part suite for sextet, “Chase Reflex,” incorporating many of the concepts and rhythms that he had been working on. He officially formed the Walking Cliché Sextet with pianist Erez Dessel, alto saxophonist Aaron Dutton, tenor saxophonist Andrew Bedard, trombonist Michael Juba Prentky, and drummer Charles Weller.

The group’s name, Walking Cliché Sextet, comes from the title of the first movement of the "Chase Reflex” suite. At first, SeaJun titled this movement with Goethe’s famous line from Faust, “Man errs as long as he strives,” but later felt it was too cliché. So he changed the title to Walking Cliché and liked it so much that he used it for his new ensemble’s name. Ironically, both the piece itself and the group’s vision are constantly striving against the cliché in music.

In May 2019, the group started playing around Boston at venues including the Lilypad, Outpost186, Thirdlife Studio, New England Conservatory, and Wally’s Jazz Cafe, building the band sound. In August 2019 they recorded their debut album of original compositions to be released in Spring 2020 and were recently selected as a 2019-2020 Honors Ensemble by the New England Conservatory.

Tornasol

Ensemble biography forthcoming.