Toby Summerfield and the Coast Jazz Orchestra at Dartmouth
The Coast Jazz Orchestra performs the celebratory and eclectic music of composer Toby Summerfield, along with a solo guitar performance by Summerfield.
New Music Festival"Never Enough Hope" is a body of music for improvising orchestra by composer Toby Summerfield, in this concert performed by Dartmouth's own Coast Jazz Orchestra. Summerfield started to organize large, celebratory ensembles to coincide with the seasonal return of music friends to Ann Arbor, part all-star team and part family reunion. After relocating to Chicago he found he missed that cyclical reunion, and mounted the first Never Enough Hope performance in 2005, combining old friends and new. The group convened roughly once a year until 2012 getting bigger each time and recording three albums worth of Summerfield's compositions. Summerfield writes the material with specific bandmembers in mind, imagining that phrases and concepts might be the player's instinctual reaction to the musical moments happening around them. Like the way a band jams on a riff and members write new parts to accompany or lead the song in a new direction. The work is grown in the soil of Summerfield's various interests; complicated rock music, minimalism, jazz composition and improvisation.
Summerfield's The Collection of Bodies of Water is material for solo guitar, conceived and realized during the pandemic. Summerfield writes, "Most of my musical ideas involve collaboration, when I've performed solo in the past it was always a novelty. This material was born of the same question I ask when I compose for my friends; 'what would so and so do alongside this riff' or 'where would my friend suggest the song go next.'
Toby Summerfield (b. 1978) Bassist, Guitarist, Collaborator, Improviser, Composer. Aught Dawg. Summerfield comes from rock music, through jazz and tries to operate in a cross-pollinated musical garden. He's most at home in complicated rock bands and free improvised situations–and especially loves when both can happen. But he'll do whatever you ask him to, within reason. He has worked extensively with Colin Stetson and Jaimie Branch, been a section leader and sub conductor for Rhys Chatham's 100 guitar performances, leads the large ensemble Never Enough Hope, and during the pandemic started a solo practice built in the tools and techniques he uses to collaborate with his musical friends. He feels lucky to have been in Ann Arbor in the late 90's and in Chicago during the Aughts, getting to play with the luminous humans who populated the music communities in those cities. Tobysummerfield.com, Tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com
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