Improvised Music + Food for Peter Kowald

damonsmith · #1 09-20-2006, 11:51 AM

2006-09-21
1510 8th
Improvised Music + Food for Peter Kowald (1944- 9/21/02) Thursday Sept. 21st 8pm @ 1510 8th st. , West Oakland. $10

Featuring Improvised music by many bass players and other musicians such as Joëlle Léandre, Damon Smith, Lisa Mezzacappa, Mark Culberson,Tony Dryer, Aurora Josephson and Many others, Original artworks by Kowald as well as his bow + Food, beer, wine, etc.

DJS will spin extremely rare Kowald vinyl including:

"Hot Lotta"
Brötzmann/Aaltonen/Kowald/Vesala

"The Peter Kowald Quintet"
Van De Loch/Christmann/Rutherford/Kowald/Lovens + more

http://www.kowald.de http://www.balancepointacoustics.com

Marcus Johnson · #2 09-20-2006, 01:31 PM

Oh man... I'm not usually a fan of "bass art", but I really like that sketch on the Kowald site.

damonsmith · #3 09-20-2006, 02:48 PM

Kowald was very serious about his visual art, in fact he had planned to go to the Dusseldorf academy to study art with Joseph Beuys, luckily his parents and Brötzmann intervened and he ended up doing music. He was connected to the art world in other ways, a photo of him apears in Nan Goldin's "Ballad of Sexual Dependancy" and Kiki Smith lists meeting him and hi sdeath as important points in her timeline in the SFMOMA catalog for her show there last year.
he was also close the german artist AR Penck, a contemporary of Baquiat. Penck finnaced the "Sound Unity festival which morphed into the Vision Festival.
I have two of his drawings.

philip sirois · #4 09-20-2006, 04:12 PM

Hi damon,

Cool post.

Not to be a know it all but Penck and Basquiat are only comtempoaries in a very strict sense. They were born 21 years apart and came up in very different environments. Penck, born in 1939 in post war east germany came from, among other things, a tradition of german expressionism that started much earlier in the century. He and his contemporaries, Baselitz, immendorf, etc are in their 60's and 70's. Penck is 67. Basquiat, on the other hand, started in post Warholian New York as a grafitti artist. He made his name in the 80's when painting was all the rage, the same time the germans, who had been producing mature work for sometime, starting selling in New York.. They, of course share some outward similarities, but Penck was definitely there way before basquiat. Basquiat would be 46 or so if he lived.

Penck is aparrently an avid amateur drummer.

Again , don't mean to be a smart guy, and I like having another art guy around here.

phil

damonsmith · #5 09-20-2006, 06:11 PM

True enough I was just simplifying matters, Penck and did love Basquiat. I love Baseslitz also.
Basqui was actually a pretty learned artist, he did do graffitti, but the other side of the story is that he was a member of the Brooklyn museum since he was 6 years old.
Penck had a label that released limited LPs as art objects. I have one with Kowald and Frank Wright. I bid $275 in an online auction, I lost and it went for over $500. I asked Kowald if it was good, he said no, and sent me one. He was right, so I keep it on the wall.