IF YOU GOWhat: Thollem McDonas in concert.When: 8 p.m. Thursday.Where: Easy Lemon, 1440 Adams St. (off Main Street).Admission: $5.Phone: 910-9729.Website: www.shakingray.com.
A pianist acclaimed as bold, inventive and an astounding improviser will perform Thursday at Easy Lemon. The show by Thollem McDonas is presented by the Shaking Ray Levi Society.
"Thollem's keyboard flights unleash cascades of notes of seemingly impossible velocity," raved composer Terry Riley. "As an improviser, he inhabits a world uniquely his own, rhythmically, harmonically and formally. A true original."
"McDonas welds elements of jazz and classical music into a mighty tower of song, then shatters his construct with the breathless bull-rush of a mystic improviser," added River Front Times.
According to his bio, McDonas tours perpetually as a soloist, vocalist and collaborator, regularly covering much of North America and Europe.
In the past six years, he has added 23 albums to his discography on 10 vanguard record labels in four countries.
He works regularly with filmmakers, dancers, poets and painters as well as a wide array of divergent musicians. His ever-expanding variety of approaches results in dramatically new and different outcomes. He has won numerous awards and is the founding director of Estamos Ensemble, a Mexican-American cross-border ensemble for musical exchange.
Easy Lemon is a new venue that will specialize in "loft shows" that draw "a few friends in close quarters."
The idea, according to organizers, is to provide small doses of artistic stimulation for the community, screening independently crafted films, premiering musical compositions, hanging conceptually advanced 2-D and 3-D art and encouraging dialogue about the finer points of art and music.