LIVESTREAM: Laurie Anderson & Christian McBride with special guest Rubin Kodheli

Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned—and daring—creative pioneers. Her work, which encompasses music, visual art, poetry, film, and photography, has challenged and delighted audiences around the world for more than forty years. In a recent "60 Minutes" profile, Anderson Cooper said she “is a pioneer of the avant-garde, but ... that doesn’t begin to describe what she creates. Her work isn’t sold in galleries. It’s experienced by audiences who come to see her perform: singing, telling stories, and playing strange violins of her own invention ... she [blends] the beautiful and the bizarre, challenging audiences with homilies and humor. She blurs boundaries across music, theater, dance, and film.” The Washington Post has said she “doesn’t just tell stories; she draws out every word with a kind of physical pleasure, tasting its flavor as she probes the everyday mysteries of life,” and the Guardian has called Anderson “one of the great popular artists and storytellers of our time.”

Anderson released her first album with Nonesuch Records in 2001, the critically lauded Life on a String. Her subsequent releases on the label include Live in New York (2002), Homeland (2010), the soundtrack to Anderson’s acclaimed film Heart of a Dog (2015), and her Grammy-winning collaboration with Kronos Quartet, Landfall (2018). Additionally, Anderson’s virtual-reality film La Camera Insabbiata, with Hsin-Chien Huang, won the 2017 Venice Film Festival Award for Best VR Experience, and, in 2018, Skira Rizzoli published her book All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code, the most comprehensive collection of her artwork to date.

Recent exhibitions and installations of Anderson’s work include Habeas Corpus at New York’s Park Avenue Armory; her largest exhibition to date, The Weather, at Washington, DC’s Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art; and Looking into a Mirror Sideways at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, which was her largest European exhibition to date. Anderson recently toured with Sex Mob, performing her piece Let X=X. Earlier this year, she was awarded the 2024 Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, along with Christopher Nolan and David Attenborough, and the International Astronomical Union named a minor planet in her honor: Asteroid 270588.

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Photo: Ebru Yildiz

Christian McBride is a six-time GRAMMY Award winning bassist/composer and the host of NPR's Jazz Night in America. Since the early 1990's Christian McBride has recorded on over 300 dates as a sideman. However, he's been a leader from his debut recording in 1995. Aside from various stints with Sting, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Roy Haynes, Freddie Hubbard and George Duke, McBride has been artist-in-residence and artistic director with organizations such as Jazz House Kids, Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Jazz Museum in Harlem, Jazz Asoen and NJPAC (New Jersey Performing Arts Center -- Newark). McBride manages to tour consistently with his quartet, the New Jawn. He also fronts the GRAMMY-winning Christian McBride Big Band, whose Mack Avenue recordings, The Good Feeling and Bringin' It won the GRAMMY® Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album in 2012 and 2017, respectively. In addition, McBride hosts "The Lowdown: Conversations With Christian" on Sirius/XM and DJs at clubs as DJ Brother Mister. McBride was recently named the artistic director of the historic Newport Jazz Festival, taking over the reins from the festival's longtime artistic director and founder, George Wein. 

Composer Rubin Kodheli (ko-thé-lee) is a celebrated, versatile, genre-transcending creative rebel. The inspirational tapestry of his work is intentionally woven from blended threads of rock, jazz and classical influences, a stylistic trademark that has afforded Kodheli a career rich in its diversity of output. From his compositions appearing in feature films such as Precious (2009), to his original symphonic rock compositions, to his collaborations as a performer with genre defining artists - including Philip Glass, Henry Threadgill, Christian McBride, Meredith Monk, Joan Jett, Tom Harrell, and Snoop Dogg.

Recently Mr.Kodheli has been performing Letters to Jack, created by the amazing and legendary writer, composer, filmmaker Laurie Anderson.

Kodheli’s eclectic work amounts to an intriguing sonic collage able to enrapture and captivate audiences.

Kodheli began his musical journey as a cellist in Albania, where, as a child, he would stay up into the night absorbing celebratory performances of traditional Albanian folk music or spend days attending numerous rehearsals with his mother, singer and actress Justina Aliaj (a-lee-i). By age fifteen, he moved to Belgium to pursue formal studies at l'Académie d'Uccle and later to Germany to attend the Richard Strauss Konservatorium. In the 1990s Kodheli received a scholarship to The Juilliard School, where he studied as a pupil of cello visionary Fred Sherry.

Post-Juilliard Kodheli’s own musical improv and work with dancers as well as with other improviser composers compelled him to learn composition. In 2013 choreographer Elisa Monte hired him to write a fifteen-minute piece for which they won a grant from New Music U.S.A.

Creating instrumental alchemy in his compositions and performances, Kodheli deftly molds the cello to emulate the timbre of a guitar, a drum, or a human voice; his rhythmic aptitudes and intuition for percussion enable him to play piano as well. His compositions teem with nuance, providing the opportunity to listen repeatedly, each time ripe with the possibility of hearing something that previously went unnoticed. Immersing audiences in honest musical explorations, Kodheli pushes listeners to engage, question and contemplate. Similarly, his compositional work empowers directors to drive home the emotional anchoring of their films.

This panoply of unique musical experiences, from childhood through the present, continues organically to guide and mold his work with filmmakers, rap artists, dancers, choreographers, fellow composers, and various other creative professionals in New York City, and around the world.