Asphalt Orchestra, performance at The Art of Collaboration, ISPA's 63rd Annual Congress, in New York City on January 11-13, 2011. View the full Schedule of Events.

Asphalt Orchestra

Asphalt Orchestra is a radical new street band that brings ambitious processional music to the mobile masses. Created in 2009 by the founders of the “relentlessly inventive” new music presenter Bang on a Can (Justin Davidson, New York Magazine), Asphalt Orchestra unleashes innovative music from concert halls, rock clubs and jazz basements and takes it to the streets. Choreographed and tight, this is the future of the marching band.

With movement direction from internationally acclaimed choreographer Susan Marshall and dressed by designer Elizabeth Hope Clancy, the 12-member band brings together some of the most exciting rock, jazz and classical players in New York City: Jessica Schmitz (piccolo), Alex Hamlin, Peter Hess and Ken Thomson (saxophones), Shane Endsley and Stephanie Richards (trumpets), Jen Baker and Alan Ferber (trombones), Kenneth Bentley (sousaphone), and Sunny Jain, Nick Jenkins and Yuri Yamashita (percussion)---whom The New York Times have called “12 top-notch brass and percussion players.”

The group premiered new commissions by Tyondai Braxton of Battles, Stew and Heidi Rodewald of the Broadway hit Passing Strange, and celebrated Balkan musician-composer Goran Bregovic; and arranged music by Björk, jazz legend Charles Mingus, Swedish metal pinoeers Meshuggah, eminent American groundbreaking composers Frank Zappa and Conlon Nancarrow, Zimbabwean iconoclast Thomas Mapfumo and Brazilian experimentalist Tom Zé.