Event

Amirtha Kidambi's Elder Ones - Saturday, March 28th at Xavier Hall

Amirtha Kidambis Elder Ones
presented in partnership with Saint Louis Universitys Department of Fine and Performing Arts

Saturday, March 28th, 2020 | 7pm Doors / 8pm Show
Xavier Hall at St. Louis University ( 3733 West Pine Mall, St. Louis, 63108 / map)

Amirtha Kidambi analog synthesizer, vocals, compositions
Max Jaffe drums & electronic percussion.
Matt Nelson soprano sax
Nick Dunston bass

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Amirtha Kidambi is the composer and bandleader of her quartet Elder Ones, with Matt Nelson (Battle Trance), Max Jaffe and Nick Dunston. Her debut recording as a bandleader has been met with critical acclaim. As Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times, the aggressive and sublime first album by the band Elder Ones, Holy Science, is a kind of gauge for how strong and flexible the scene of young musicians in New Yorks improvised and experimental music world can be. At the center of it are drones and phonemes. The groups leader, the composer and singer Amirtha Kidambi, holds forth behind a harmonium, the small keyboard instrument with hand-pumped bellows; its commonly used in bhajan, the Indian devotional-singing tradition that was central to her musical experience while growing up in a South Indian family.

Kidambi formally trained in classical music, singing works by experimental composers including Robert Ashley and Luigi Nono, but the pull of free jazz and Alice Coltrane led her down a different path. The influences of both Alice and John Coltrane are especially apparent, as is her study of Carnatic music. The groups follow-up album From Untruth was released in March 2019, on Northern Spy Records.