Travis Laplante photo by Greg Brown.
Monday, November 4
Chapel Performance Space, 7:30PM
Travis Laplante is a saxophonist, composer, and qigong practitioner. His tornado of a performancewith Gerald Cleaver at last year’s festival was one of the great Earshot shows.
He returns, this time solo, for what is sure to be a breathless showing. Laplante has made a name for himself through his imaginative compositions and fierce playing style. Relentless arpeggiation outlining harmonic progressions, endlessly fueled by circular breathing; multiphonics that whisper multiple notes with haunting, clarity and control it’s these types of mystifying and transporting qualities that help him to create music that “should be played and heard with every cell of the body.”
In addition to his solo work, Laplante writes and plays for his tenor saxophone quartet Battle Trance, and his long-standing band Little Women. He currently works in projects with Trevor Dunn, Michael Formanek, Mat Maneri, Randy Peterson, Ingrid Laubrock, Tom Rainey, and many others.
Heavily influenced by Daoism and the practice of qigong, Laplante seeks to empty the ego of its own desires and wants. Part of this process has been letting go of the more compositional elements he is known for in his performances—preferring instead to walk into a room with no agenda except to become one with the room and the audience.
This was the inspiration for performing live and recording seven consecutive nights of pure improvisation in southern Vermont—a brutal process of emptying to discover moments of magic and crushing vulnerability. The result are self-churning moments of humility and growth with profound new depth, compiled on Laplante’s album, human, on New Amsterdam Records.
Laplante returns to share the sincere joys and intimacy of solo improvisation with Earshot audiences in one of Seattle’s most sacred spaces for the experience of music, The Chapel Performance Space.
$10–27. For more information visit earshot.org.
