User:EllenZoe/sandbox/David Breskin

David Breskin is an American writer, poet, and record producer. He has written nine books, including collaborations with the visual artists Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha. Beginning in the early 1980s, he produced albums by musicians including John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Vernon Reid. In more recent years, he has worked with Nels Cline, Mary Halvorson, Kris Davis, Dan Weiss, Ingrid Laubrock, and Craig Taborn,, among others.

Breskin's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly and New American Writing, among other journals.

RICHTER 858
For his multi-media book RICHTER 858, published by SFMOMA/D.A.P in 2002, Breskin commissioned twelve American poets--including Robert Hass, Michael Palmer, Jorie Graham, Ann Lauterbach and Dean Young--to write poems inspired by the paintings of Gerhard Richter. Dave Hickey and Klaus Kertess contributed essays. He also commissioned Bill Frisell to compose new music for the project. Frisell formed the 858 Quartet with Jenny Scheinman on violin, Eyvind Kang on viola, and Hank Roberts on cello to perform the music for RICHTER 858. About the music Jazz Times wrote: "One might say that Richter sounds like Frisell; his broad lateral smears find their aural counterpart in Frisell's wobbly yet hard nosed minimalism." The 858 Quartet has toured and recorded extensively since then.

Music production, 1990s to present
In the 1990s and into the following decade, Breskin produced albums for Miniature (Tim Berne, Joey Baron, Hank Roberts), Herb Robertson and Bobby Previte, in addition to three albums for Joey Baron + Barondown. In 2005, the music piece of the RICHTER 858 album was re-released as a stand-alone CD on the Songlines label. For his 2010 multi-media artist collaboration with Ed Ruscha, DIRTY BABY, Breskin commissioned and produced new music by Nels Cline. Rolling Stone wrote: "The two-disc Dirty Baby, his collaboration with polymath poet-producer David Breskin, is Cline’s most far-reaching work yet." That same year, he produced The Nels Cline Singers album, Initiate.

Between 2014 and 2016, Breskin produced The Nels Cline Singers' follow-up, Macroscope, as well as albums by Mark Dresser, Ben Goldberg, Kris Davis and Mary Halvorson. Davis' Duopoly, released in 2016, was a series of duets with eight musicians--guitarists Bill Frisell and Julian Lage, pianists Craig Taborn and Angelica Sanchez, drummers Billy Drummond and Marcus Gilmore, and reed players Tim Berne and Don Byron--recorded live to two-track. Of Mary Halvorson's 2016 Away with You, The New York Times called it "unflinching and full of grace ... a standout jazz release of the year". He worked again with Nels Cline, this time on his 23-person ensemble album, Lovers, named by the 2016 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll as one of the Top 10 albums of that year.

Since that time, Breskin's production projects include albums by Kris Davis and Craig Taborn, Dan Weiss, Mary Halvorson, Chris Lightcap, Cory Smythe, and Ingrid Laubrock. . Davis and Taborn joined together to release the Breskin-produced Octopus in 2018. The recording was the distillation of a dozen concerts in a national tour that took place in fall of 2016. Of the album, The Wall Street Journal wrote, "Ms. Davis and Mr. Taborn...are elevating jazz beyond the limiting continuum of accessibility and abstraction."

In 2018, he produced Weiss' Starebaby, an album from the drummer/composer's quintet that featured Craig Taborn and Matt Mitchell on keyboards, piano, and electronics; Trevor Dunn on bass; and Ben Monder on guitars. The eight songs on Starebaby were a blend of jazz and heavy metal influences. Halvorson's double album that year, Code Girl, featured her improvisational style set to lyrics. It was called "riveting" by Nate Chinen for NPR's The Record, and "the most startling move of her solo career."

Laubrock's 2018 album, Contemporary Chaos Practices, was her first orchestral recording, featuring 47 musicians and two conductors. "Volgelfrei" from this album was named by The New York Times as one of "The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2018".



Discography
– Source: