John Hollenbeck
With the release of his new album Songs You Like a Lot, featuring incisive, beautiful big-band arrangements of classics by the Bee Gees, James Taylor, Peter Gabriel and more, drummer/composer John Hollenbeck completes a celebrated trilogy that began in 2013 with Songs I Like a Lot and continued in 2015 with Songs We Like a Lot. But in tandem with the album’s release, Hollenbeck is also announcing the public launch of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization Flexatonic Arts, Inc., and his appointment as Artistic and Educational Director. In 2019, Hollenbeck recovered ownership and control of most of his cherished recordings with The Claudia Quintet, the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble and more — albums that originally saw release on Sunnyside, OmniTone, Cuneiform, CRI and other labels, and assigned them to Flexatonic Arts. The new Flexatonic Records label has already begun to re-release these albums digitally under its own banner at https://johnhollenbeck.bandcamp.com.
As an artist-driven nonprofit analogous to John Zorn’s Hips Road or Oliver Lake’s Passin’ Thru, Inc., Rob Garcia’s Connection Works, Inc. and Matthew Garrison’s ShapeShifter Plus, Flexatonic Arts will serve as an organizational headquarters for all of Hollenbeck’s cultural and educational activities, and a vehicle for embracing the initiatives of likeminded colleagues. Under Hollenbeck’s direction, Flexatonic is also developing projects and collective-minded mutual support structures in partnership with more than a dozen similarly focused nonprofits and other artists and educators to create viable and sustainable methods within the new environment of artistic expression and education.
Currently serving as Professor of Jazz Studies at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music in Montreal, Hollenbeck is a five-time Grammy Award nominee and the recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2010 ASCAP Jazz Vanguard Award and a 2012 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, among many other honors. Mentored by the great Bob Brookmeyer and Meredith Monk, he has honed a radiant compositional voice in the interstices of jazz and new music, writing for every format from large ensemble to duo and many unconventional settings in between. He’s been hailed by The New York Times as “one of today’s most dynamic orchestral jazz bandleaders,” a claim richly evident in his Songs trilogy with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band, in which he has audaciously reimagined and transformed classic pop by the likes of Cyndi Lauper, Jimmy Webb, Daft Punk, Queen, Burt Bacharach and more.
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Current Release
2020
Flexatonic Arts Inc.
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