MATA Festival - ENTER THE IMPOSSIBLE - June 11, 2025
ENTER THE IMPOSSIBLE
Opening Night: Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at 7pm (doors 6:30)
Performances by Sun Ra Arkestra; FLUX Quartet; Jessie Cox, drums; and Sam Yulsman, piano and electronics
Program:
Jessie Cox: Enter the Impossible (2023) for Sun Ra Arkestra; commissioned by the Paul Fromm Foundation
Oliver Lake: One Move (2022, New York Premiere)
Jessie Cox: Sound Drape Painting (2025, World Premiere)
+*Diallo Banks: Sarmad for String Quartet (2025, World Premiere)
The 27th annual MATA Festival opens with Jessie Cox’s evening-length opus Enter the Impossible, written for and performed by the unparalleled Sun Ra Arkestra, with FLUX Quartet and Sam Yulsman. Enter the Impossible is imagined as a space flight, journeying through different musical spaces, including many pieces from Sun Ra Arkestra’s large collection of works, such as Say from their recent record Swirling, or the classic Space is the Place, among others. The concert also includes the world premiere of Cox’s Sound Drape Painting, inspired by Sam Gilliam’s drape paintings and exploring new ways of hearing musical form and movement through the sonic. Cox explains, “Music as aesthetic experience proposes, or is a site to imagine, ways of spacing – how we come to inhabit and make space and time." FLUX Quartet will also perform the New York premiere of jazz saxophonist, flutist, composer, poet, and visual artist Oliver Lake’s One Move as well as the world premiere of MATA Festival 2025 Early-Career Composer Diallo Banks’ Sarmad for string quartet. Sarmad is structured around the concept of yati, a principle in South Indian music that shapes musical phrases through systematic variation.