Gagosian Premieres

In this Session, pianist and composer Jason Moran performs a contemporary jazz reinterpretation of the 1919 song “All of No Man’s Land Is Ours” inside Ellen Gallagher’s solo exhibition of the same title at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Written by the influential jazz pioneer James Reese Europe, who founded the regimental band the Harlem Hellfighters, the lyrics recount a soldier’s call home to his sweetheart. The track is from Moran’s latest album, From the Dancehall to the Battlefield, in which he meditates on Europe’s life, music, and legacy, revisiting the originals while incorporating new sounds and strategies, including “real-time remixing.”

In this Session, blues poet, musician, and organizer aja monet performs with Weedie Braimah, Jeremiah Edwards, Craig Harris, Jehbreal Jackson, and Samora Pinderhughes inside the exhibition Amoako Boafo: what could possibly go wrong, if we tell it like it is at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York. In a powerful exchange of spoken word and song, monet reads poetry that she composed in response to Boafo’s portraits, which blend themes of Black love, resistance, joy, and community building, while her musical collaborators perform a free-flowing new interpretation of Aaron Neville’s 1966 soul hit “Tell It Like It Is” on piano, bass, drums, trombone, didgeridoo, and djembe, with expressive vocals by Jackson. Pinderhughes and Braimah also worked with monet on her recently released debut album, When the Poems Do What They Do (2023), which was described by NPR’s Sheldon Pearce as “gorgeously meditative and potently groovy.”

As part of Sessions, a spin-off of Gagosian Premieres, musician, producer, and film and television composer Isabella Summers, a founding member of Florence and the Machine, performs inside the exhibition Cy Twombly at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. Summers presents three chapters from a piece she composed, titled To Neptune, Ruler of the Seas Profound, that is inspired by Twombly’s life and work. The music is interwoven with quotations from poems and literary texts by authors who have served as muses or subjects for Twombly, including Homer, Stéphane Mallarmé, and William Butler Yeats.

As part of Sessions, a spin-off of Gagosian Premieres, Bessie Award–winning composer and pianist Pete Drungle performs an improvised piece for piano created in response to Urs Fischer’s exhibition of digital sculptures at Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles, which was presented by Gagosian. Previously, Drungle has made music with Ornette Coleman, Craig Harris, Yoko Ono, and others, and has collaborated with visual artists including Lilibeth Cuenca-Rasmussen, Rudolf Stingel, and Spencer Sweeney. In CHAOS, he responds to five hundred unique works from Fischer’s series CHAOS #1–#501, which are displayed in the exhibition on a trio of colossal suspended screens. Wielding his mastery of multiple genres and techniques, Drungle explores polyrhythm and polytonality in the context of a maximalist visual presentation.

As part of Sessions, a spin-off of Gagosian Premieres, composer and saxophonist John Zorn and bass guitarist and producer Bill Laswell perform an improvised work in Sterling Ruby’s exhibition TURBINES, at Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street, New York. Zorn is celebrated for his experimental approaches to composition and improvisation in forms ranging from classical, jazz, and ambient music to rock, metal, and hardcore. Here he plays saxophone while Laswell, a prolific and diverse musical collaborator known for his involvement with the band Material among many other projects, plays electric bass. The duo responds to Ruby’s new abstract paintings, which create a sense of flurried motion through the energetic convergence of materials.

As part of Sessions, a new spin-off of Gagosian Premieres, experimental musician and composer Laura Ortman performs “ROSINBOWS” inside Art in Process: Part One—a survey of works by Nam June Paik spanning his career—at Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York. Drawing on her Indigenous lineage, Ortman distorts the sound of her Apache-inflected violin stylings with an array of effects pedals, looping its output with a four-track cassette recorder to create a new piece of improvised music in response to the exhibition. Expressing an affinity with Paik and the Fluxus movement, she harnesses light and color, technology, and the operation of chance to combine visual, aural, and spatial components into a unified environment.

As part of Sessions, a new spin-off of Gagosian Premieres, six-time Grammy-nominated Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott) performs “Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning” alongside drummer Elé Salif Howell, inside Awol Erizku’s exhibition Memories of a Lost Sphinx at Gagosian, Park & 75, New York. In this track from his upcoming album, Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning, Chief Adjuah debuts his latest musical instrument, a double-sided harp called the Chief Adjuah Bow, which he describes as a hybrid of four instruments: a West African donso n’goni, or “hunter’s harp”; a West African kamele n’goni, or “young man’s harp”; a kora; and an electric guitar. The pair previously collaborated when Scott composed the score for Mystic Parallax, Erizku’s solo exhibition at FLAG Art Foundation in New York.

As part of Sessions, a new spin-off of Gagosian Premieres, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Alice Smith delivers an unforgettable interpretation of the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins classic “I Put a Spell on You” (1956) inside the exhibition Social Works II at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London. Hawkins’s song was famously covered by Nina Simone in 1965 and has since been performed and recorded by many other artists, from Bette Midler to Marilyn Manson. In 2015, Smith’s haunting rendition was featured on the album Nina Revisited... A Tribute to Nina Simone.