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Obra: La Ultima Cena.
Autor: Dan Rosen.
Dirección: Sebastián Blanco Leiss.
Labor: Diseño de Escenografía y Vestuario.
(Junto a Florencia Del Gener).
Teatro: Diagonal. Mar del Plata.
Ganador Premio Estrella de Mar 2009: Mejor obra del Circuito Off.
Teatro: ElKafka Espacio Teatral. Buenos Aires.
Fotos: Mariana Del Gener.
Peter D. Gerakaris, "Installation View: Terrarium Tondo Series I-V," Oil on canvas over multiple panels.
On permanent exhibition at US Embassy in Libreville, Gabon. Permanent Collection of the US Department of State Art in Embassies Program (AIE)
More info at:
Today we celebrate fire. Not the kind you strike with a match, not the kind that warms your hands on a cold night, but the kind that walks into a room before you do and leaves scorch marks on the walls. And in Spain, they had a name for that kind of fire. They called it Lola Flores.
They used to say she couldn’t sing, couldn’t dance but nobody ever said she couldn’t burn. Because when Lola Flores stepped onto a stage, something happened to the air. The laws of physics took the night off. Gravity loosened its grip. Time leaned back in its chair and lit a cigarette.
Lola Flores came from Jerez de la Frontera, a place soaked in wine and dust and old songs that don’t belong to anyone anymore. Songs that pass from mouth to mouth like secrets. Flamenco songs don’t ask permission. They don’t knock. They come in through the window.
Lola didn’t interpret flamenco. She argued with it. She wrestled it to the ground and let it get back up just to do it again. They called her La Faraona, the Pharaoh, which tells you something. Pharaohs don’t audition. Pharaohs don’t explain themselves. They rule by presence alone. You don’t have to understand them, you just have to feel smaller in the room. She made movies where the plot didn’t matter. She sang songs where the notes weren’t the point. It was all about the moment when her heel hit the floor and the world snapped into focus.
There’s an old saying: “Lola Flores no sabe cantar, pero no se la pierdan.” That means -Lola Flores doesn’t know how to sing, but don’t miss her.
That’s a line that could apply to a lot of people who changed music. Plenty of singers had perfect voices and left no fingerprints behind. Others had cracks, dust, and blood in their sound and that’s where the truth leaked through. Lola sang the way storms sing. Off-key, unstoppable, necessary. She lived loud, loved loud, fought loud. She carried joy and tragedy in the same suitcase and never bothered to separate them. When she laughed, it sounded like defiance. When she cried, it sounded like a warning. And when she died, Spain didn’t just lose a performer. It lost a temperature.
(in other medium) m.youtube.com/watch?v=-NDjcixfEAA
So today, if you hear a rhythm that makes your foot tap without asking your brain for permission… If you hear a voice that doesn’t care whether it’s beautiful, only whether it’s real… That might be Lola Flores passing through the waves, cause fire doesn’t disappear, it just changes shape.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
CICERO-Foyergespräch mit dem Künstler Markus Lüpertz und den CICERO-Redakteuren Christoph Schwennicke und Alexander Marguier;
Nikon D810, 70-200mm f/2,8
This 2012 artwork is by Mexican visual artist Carlos Amorales and is called "We will see how everything reverberates". It was photographed during an exhibition at the Turner Contemporary gallery, Margate, England (March until September 2015).
Obra: La Ultima Cena.
Autor: Dan Rosen.
Dirección: Sebastián Blanco Leiss.
Labor: Diseño de Escenografía y Vestuario.
(Junto a Florencia Del Gener).
Teatro: Diagonal. Mar del Plata.
Ganador Premio Estrella de Mar 2009: Mejor obra del Circuito Off.
Teatro: ElKafka Espacio Teatral. Buenos Aires.
Temporada 2009.
Fotos: Mariana Del Gener.
On Monday, December 19th, we partnered with Lenovo computers to build out the ultimate art-themed smackdown. Hosted at Villain in Williamsburg, guests stepped into a fully imagined warehouse art party. That night it was all about participation. We created a series of art activities to get guests making art and meeting each other. Guests captured the revelry of the night in Ventikoland’s projection photo booth. After some savory Espolón cocktails and tacos the art battle was ready to begin. 2 amazing artists competed head-to-head in a series of timed challenges and a head-to-head battle of creative awesomeness. Interludes were provided by a pop & lock round girl, battling breakdancers, and a duo of beatboxers.
Event Design by Adam Aleksander Presents
Photography by Lukas Maverick Greyson
"Flip Not Thine Wig" (site-specific sculpture)
Year: 2006
Materials: glass, wood, mirror tile, electric motor, electric lights, glitter flake, acrylic
Dimensions: 72 x 26 x 38 inches
Information: “Flip Not Thine Wig” was my sculptural response to my chosen launch site for Super Troopers, the offsite project for National Psyche: Feminine Vision, Thought, and Action during Wartime. Glama Rama Hair Salon located in the Mission District, San Francisco provided a delicious backdrop to deliver a project inspired by Glam culture and the outrageous kitsch of Liberace. I completely customized a department store display case with ½ inch mirrored tile, fitting the interior with dimming lights and motorized fans that that would generated a frenetic glitter-storm for visitors to delight in. During operating hours, art lovers, salon clients, and passersby would co-mingle around an outdoor pneumatic sculpture that playfully addressed the over-the-top aesthetic of Hollywood glitz and glamour.
CICERO-Foyergespräch mit dem Künstler Markus Lüpertz und den CICERO-Redakteuren Christoph Schwennicke und Alexander Marguier;
Nikon D810, 70-200mm f/2,8
Hypnotic Wobble - Describe yourself in three words. 🐔 🐍 🐹 #ozwyz #generativeart #cool #abstracto #inspirationalart #glitchart #kaleidoscope #worldofartists #visualartist #weird #intense #biartist #sparkling #newart #hallucination #glitchy #digitaldesign #weirdart #procreate #handmade #visualart #generative #speckled #digitalart #dynamicart #artwatchers #hotart #saphic instagr.am/p/CPBudaYHFm5/
Andrew J. Bacevich the 65 year old American Professor of International Relations and retired career officer in the US Army has published an article in the LA Times titled ‘Divorcing Pakistan’ which contends the interests of Washington and Islamabad do not align, and neither do their preferred forms of paranoia. Bacevich states “The history of U.S.-Pakistani relations is one of wild swings between feigned friendship and ill-disguised mistrust. When the United States needs Pakistan, Washington showers Islamabad with money, weapons and expressions of high esteem. Once the need wanes, the gratuities cease, often with brutal abruptness. Instead of largesse, Pakistan gets lectures, with the instruction seldom well received. …But seldom has a marriage of convenience produced greater inconvenience and consternation for the parties involved. Simply put, U.S. and Pakistani interests do not align. Worse, neither do our preferred forms of paranoia. Pakistanis don't worry about Islamists taking over the world. Americans are untroubled by the prospect of India emerging as a power of the first rank. The United States stayed in this unhappy marriage for the last decade in large part because Pakistan provided the transit route for supplies sustaining NATO's ongoing war in landlocked Afghanistan. … A recently negotiated agreement with several former-Soviet Central Asian republics creates alternatives, removing Pakistan's grip on NATO's logistical windpipe. …As with most divorces, the proceedings promise to be ugly. Already, the U.S. is escalating its campaign of missile attacks against "militants" on Pakistani soil. U.S. officials dismiss complaints that this infringes on Pakistan's national sovereignty.” Inspired by LA Times ow.ly/cbDec image source Facebook ow.ly/cbDbG
A charity project through Bridge Communities; 'A Chair Affair' was an event where artists were sponsored to create a work of art using chairs as the vehicle, which were then showcased in retail shops in the Western Suburbs of Chicago. These works then went up to auction where 100% of the proceeds went to families and individuals in need. Bridge Communities strives to help those in need and aim to help people get their lives back on track. This was my second 'A Chair Affair', my first one taking place in Naperville in 2014.
FB: michelle.robinson/pg/michelle.robinson.images.and.art
IG: @simply.mich.robinson / @mich/robinson
Masks. Not the kind you wear to the masquerade ball, not the kind you pull over your eyes to rob a bank, no, these are the ones you’re born into and spend your whole life trying to peel off. And that brings us to celebrate the finest writer in the game, the one who knew a thing or two about masks, and much more. Yukio Mishima.
Mishima was born Hiraoka Kimitake in Tokyo in 1925, a time when the world was already sharpening its knives. He grew up sickly, bookish, raised in the shadow of a grandmother who kept him close to the floor and far from the sun. But inside that fragile frame was a mind running marathons. He wrote like a man possessed -novels, plays, essays- words stacking up like dominoes, one thought knocking the next into place.
Mishima wrote about beauty the way some folks write about doom. He saw beauty as something dangerous, something that burns hot and fast, like a match struck in a dark room. In Confessions of a Mask, he tells you right up front that life is a performance, and he’s been playing a role since the curtain went up. Desire, identity, death, they’re all tangled together like headphone wires in your pocket. One of the things that makes Mishima a master in writing is the way he accomplish to write about beauty and death at the same time. Mishima didn’t write about death like it was the end of the line. He wrote about it like it was a spotlight. For him, death didn’t erase beauty it completed it. You see, Mishima believed beauty was fragile. Too fragile to survive time. If something beautiful lingered too long, it risked becoming ordinary, and ordinary was the one thing he couldn’t forgive. A cherry blossom isn’t beautiful despite the fact that it falls it’s beautiful because it falls. Stick around too long and you’re just another leaf on the ground. In his writing, death is always nearby, leaning against the doorframe, checking its watch. Young men with perfect bodies. Women frozen in moments of unbearable grace. Ideals so pure they can’t survive the morning. Mishima lets you admire them, but he never lets you relax. You know something’s coming. You can feel the blade before it appears. He wrote sentences the way a swordsman makes cuts -clean, deliberate, no wasted motion. And every so often, right in the middle of something lovely, he reminds you that beauty’s twin is destruction. Not because he was cruel, but because he thought beauty without risk was just decoration. For Mishima, death was a way of sealing beauty in amber. A way of saying, this mattered enough to end for. That’s a dangerous idea. It can lead you to dark places. But it’s also why his work hums with intensity. Every page feels like it knows it won’t live forever. He said things like “True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys" and "Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it”. That’s painful, absolute experience beyond mere aesthetics, emphasizing ideals of fleeting perfection and heroic death.
After the war, when Japan traded its sword for a suit and tie, Mishima went the other way. He built his body like a temple, or maybe like a weapon. Lifted weights. Practiced kendo. Started a private militia. That’s right—while everyone else was buying TVs, Mishima was polishing armor. He believed the soul needed a strong house to live in, and he wasn’t interested in drywall.
And then there’s the ending. Mishima didn’t fade out, he went out in a cymbal crash. November 25, 1970. A military base. A speech nobody listened to. And then ritual suicide, straight out of another century. You don’t have to agree with it. You don’t even have to understand it. But you can’t say he didn’t mean it. The man turned his life into a final sentence and put a period at the end. Some people live their lives like a rough draft. Mishima lived his like it was already carved in stone.
So today, think about the masks you wear. The ones that protect you. The ones that hide you. And the ones that might, someday, tell the truth about who you really are.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Obra: La Ultima Cena.
Autor: Dan Rosen.
Dirección: Sebastián Blanco Leiss.
Labor: Diseño de Escenografía y Vestuario.
(Junto a Florencia Del Gener).
Teatro: Diagonal. Mar del Plata.
Ganador Premio Estrella de Mar 2009: Mejor obra del Circuito Off.
Teatro: ElKafka Espacio Teatral. Buenos Aires.
Fotos: Mariana Del Gener.
On Monday, December 19th, we partnered with Lenovo computers to build out the ultimate art-themed smackdown. Hosted at Villain in Williamsburg, guests stepped into a fully imagined warehouse art party. That night it was all about participation. We created a series of art activities to get guests making art and meeting each other. Guests captured the revelry of the night in Ventikoland’s projection photo booth. After some savory Espolón cocktails and tacos the art battle was ready to begin. 2 amazing artists competed head-to-head in a series of timed challenges and a head-to-head battle of creative awesomeness. Interludes were provided by a pop & lock round girl, battling breakdancers, and a duo of beatboxers.
Event Design by Adam Aleksander Presents
Photography by Lukas Maverick Greyson
On Monday, December 19th, we partnered with Lenovo computers to build out the ultimate art-themed smackdown. Hosted at Villain in Williamsburg, guests stepped into a fully imagined warehouse art party. That night it was all about participation. We created a series of art activities to get guests making art and meeting each other. Guests captured the revelry of the night in Ventikoland’s projection photo booth. After some savory Espolón cocktails and tacos the art battle was ready to begin. 2 amazing artists competed head-to-head in a series of timed challenges and a head-to-head battle of creative awesomeness. Interludes were provided by a pop & lock round girl, battling breakdancers, and a duo of beatboxers.
Event Design by Adam Aleksander Presents
Photography by Lukas Maverick Greyson
Obra: La Ultima Cena.
Autor: Dan Rosen.
Dirección: Sebastián Blanco Leiss.
Labor: Diseño de Escenografía y Vestuario.
(Junto a Florencia Del Gener).
Teatro: Diagonal. Mar del Plata.
Ganador Premio Estrella de Mar 2009: Mejor obra del Circuito Off.
Teatro: ElKafka Espacio Teatral. Buenos Aires.
Temporada 2009.
Fotos: Mariana Del Gener.
Jenny & the Mexicats Lunario 76
Jenny and the mexicats
Photographer: Ernesto De la Vega “Kaede”
Nikon D5100
Lens 18 – 55mm y 55 – 300mm
2013
On Monday, December 19th, we partnered with Lenovo computers to build out the ultimate art-themed smackdown. Hosted at Villain in Williamsburg, guests stepped into a fully imagined warehouse art party. That night it was all about participation. We created a series of art activities to get guests making art and meeting each other. Guests captured the revelry of the night in Ventikoland’s projection photo booth. After some savory Espolón cocktails and tacos the art battle was ready to begin. 2 amazing artists competed head-to-head in a series of timed challenges and a head-to-head battle of creative awesomeness. Interludes were provided by a pop & lock round girl, battling breakdancers, and a duo of beatboxers.
Event Design by Adam Aleksander Presents
Photography by Lukas Maverick Greyson
Born in Ukraine 1953, Valentina has been living in Finland since 2000.
I met her in an art gallery where she was discussing with the gallery people, the last details concerning her exhibition, scheduled for the next day. She invited me to the vernissage--opening-- and to participate in one of her water-painting courses, sometime on a weekend.
On Monday, December 19th, we partnered with Lenovo computers to build out the ultimate art-themed smackdown. Hosted at Villain in Williamsburg, guests stepped into a fully imagined warehouse art party. That night it was all about participation. We created a series of art activities to get guests making art and meeting each other. Guests captured the revelry of the night in Ventikoland’s projection photo booth. After some savory Espolón cocktails and tacos the art battle was ready to begin. 2 amazing artists competed head-to-head in a series of timed challenges and a head-to-head battle of creative awesomeness. Interludes were provided by a pop & lock round girl, battling breakdancers, and a duo of beatboxers.
Event Design by Adam Aleksander Presents
Photography by Lukas Maverick Greyson
On Monday, December 19th, we partnered with Lenovo computers to build out the ultimate art-themed smackdown. Hosted at Villain in Williamsburg, guests stepped into a fully imagined warehouse art party. That night it was all about participation. We created a series of art activities to get guests making art and meeting each other. Guests captured the revelry of the night in Ventikoland’s projection photo booth. After some savory Espolón cocktails and tacos the art battle was ready to begin. 2 amazing artists competed head-to-head in a series of timed challenges and a head-to-head battle of creative awesomeness. Interludes were provided by a pop & lock round girl, battling breakdancers, and a duo of beatboxers.
Event Design by Adam Aleksander Presents
Photography by Lukas Maverick Greyson
On Monday, December 19th, we partnered with Lenovo computers to build out the ultimate art-themed smackdown. Hosted at Villain in Williamsburg, guests stepped into a fully imagined warehouse art party. That night it was all about participation. We created a series of art activities to get guests making art and meeting each other. Guests captured the revelry of the night in Ventikoland’s projection photo booth. After some savory Espolón cocktails and tacos the art battle was ready to begin. 2 amazing artists competed head-to-head in a series of timed challenges and a head-to-head battle of creative awesomeness. Interludes were provided by a pop & lock round girl, battling breakdancers, and a duo of beatboxers.
Event Design by Adam Aleksander Presents
Photography by Lukas Maverick Greyson
On Monday, December 19th, we partnered with Lenovo computers to build out the ultimate art-themed smackdown. Hosted at Villain in Williamsburg, guests stepped into a fully imagined warehouse art party. That night it was all about participation. We created a series of art activities to get guests making art and meeting each other. Guests captured the revelry of the night in Ventikoland’s projection photo booth. After some savory Espolón cocktails and tacos the art battle was ready to begin. 2 amazing artists competed head-to-head in a series of timed challenges and a head-to-head battle of creative awesomeness. Interludes were provided by a pop & lock round girl, battling breakdancers, and a duo of beatboxers.
Event Design by Adam Aleksander Presents
Photography by Lukas Maverick Greyson
Today we celebrate a painter out there in the long shadows of Spain, walked around with a cane sometimes, wore a mustache sharp enough to cut glass and dreams both. Name of Salvador Dalí. You know, some people paint apples, some paint boats, some paint women sitting beside windows wondering where the years went. Dalí painted clocks that looked like they’d melted off the wall after hearing bad news.
Now I been thinking about him, and about time itself. Time’s a funny thing. You lose it in bus stations. You find it in old songs. Sometimes it drips right through your fingers like candle wax. Dalí knew that before most folks even finished winding their watches.
He came out of Figueres, where the sun hangs heavy over the stones and every alleyway looks like it remembers a secret. As a boy he saw ghosts in the wallpaper and armies in the clouds. Some people grow out of that sort of thing. He made a career out of it.
You look at one of his paintings and it’s like tuning whatever halfway between sleep and daylight. There are ants crawling over gold watches, elephants walking on legs taller than church steeples, faces turning into landscapes, landscapes turning into dreams.
He once said the only difference between him and a madman was that he wasn’t mad. That’s the kind of thing a madman says, but he said it with such style you just let him pass.
And style, well, he had enough style for three generations. Dalí dressed like a duke who’d wandered into a carnival by mistake. He gave interviews like he was conducting an orchestra only he could hear. Hung around with filmmakers, poets, socialites, wild-eyed philosophers and people who probably shouldn’t have been left alone near open flames.
He worked with Luis Buñuel on films where eyeballs got sliced open and logic packed its bags and left town. Later on he’d bump shoulders with Walt Disney, which makes more sense than people think. Disney and Dalí both understood that dreams got architecture. One built castles for children, the other built them for insomniacs. He made the graphic design for the universal lollipop Chupa-Chups, yeah, that’s him in plastic and sweets.
And there’s music in his paintings too. Not literal music, maybe, but rhythm. Silence. The long echo after the last note fades. Paintings like midnight train whistles. Like accordions heard through apartment walls. Like somebody whispering in a language you almost remember from before you were born.
Dalí understood that art didn’t have to behave itself. It could lie. It could hallucinate. It could laugh at you while showing you the truth sideways. That’s important. Sometimes the straight road tells you less than the crooked one.
You ever notice dreams don’t edit themselves? Nobody in a dream says, “Now hold on, that fish shouldn’t be wearing a tuxedo.” Dreams just keep moving. Dalí painted with that same authority. He painted impossible things with the confidence of a man describing the weather.
And underneath all the circus smoke and melted watches, there’s loneliness there too. Fear of death. Fear of decay. Fear that time keeps moving even when love doesn’t. The old blues singers knew that feeling. So did Dalí. Different instruments, same song. Maybe that’s why people still stare at his paintings like they’re waiting for them to blink. Because somewhere between the madness and the mastery, Salvador Dalí figured out something most people spend their whole lives avoiding: Reality’s a stranger place than dreams ever were.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
A Glitch "Sosies (σόσια) ~ Ètude V”
This art piece were created for my PhD and based on a Digital and Analog Aesthetic Research on "Artistic Practices, Digital Art in Social Networks and Net Art", some digital techniques used of artistic diversity, such as the re-mixed appropriation of image or video, also work conceived as original data work called creative altered binary code, datamoshing, generative art and glitch art worked in all its forms and expressions; works of art with a strong focus decoding the i-frames of images and videos (also known as key frames and altered or distorted creative binary code) mixed with seductive techniques of Pixelsorting Art; making it seem extremely sensitive and abstract; created exclusively for the virtual gallery on-line.
by ™℗®© Louis M o n t i e l
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Facebook ~ Louis Montiel
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#visualartists #glitchart #glitch #glitché #pixelsorting #glitchartistscollective #glitchvideo #datamosh #digitalglitch #videoglitch #hyperspektiv #minimalart #videoart #dfkt #pixelsorter #artistsvisual #glitchartoninstagram #glitchartscollective #glitcharts #glitchartistcommunity #glitchartwork #glitchartisdead #glitchartists #glitchartcommunity #glitchartistcollective #glitchartist #pixelsortingart #proceduralart #creativecodeart #glitchportrait
On Monday, December 19th, we partnered with Lenovo computers to build out the ultimate art-themed smackdown. Hosted at Villain in Williamsburg, guests stepped into a fully imagined warehouse art party. That night it was all about participation. We created a series of art activities to get guests making art and meeting each other. Guests captured the revelry of the night in Ventikoland’s projection photo booth. After some savory Espolón cocktails and tacos the art battle was ready to begin. 2 amazing artists competed head-to-head in a series of timed challenges and a head-to-head battle of creative awesomeness. Interludes were provided by a pop & lock round girl, battling breakdancers, and a duo of beatboxers.
Event Design by Adam Aleksander Presents
Photography by Lukas Maverick Greyson
D843_007
08/04/2017 : Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, Château La Coste : exposition Mountains and Seas (Ai Weiwei)
All Fingers Must Point Down
On Monday, December 19th, we partnered with Lenovo computers to build out the ultimate art-themed smackdown. Hosted at Villain in Williamsburg, guests stepped into a fully imagined warehouse art party. That night it was all about participation. We created a series of art activities to get guests making art and meeting each other. Guests captured the revelry of the night in Ventikoland’s projection photo booth. After some savory Espolón cocktails and tacos the art battle was ready to begin. 2 amazing artists competed head-to-head in a series of timed challenges and a head-to-head battle of creative awesomeness. Interludes were provided by a pop & lock round girl, battling breakdancers, and a duo of beatboxers.
Event Design by Adam Aleksander Presents
Photography by Lukas Maverick Greyson
A Glitch "Burqa 2.0(برقع) ~ Ètude II“
by ™℗®© Louis M o n t i e l
~ FOLLOW ME & SUBSCRIBE ~
Instagram ~ louismontielt
Facebook ~ Louis Montiel
YouTube ~ Louis M o n t i e l
#visualartists #glitchart #glitch #glitché #pixelsorting #glitchartistscollective #glitchvideo #datamosh #digitalglitch #videoglitch #hyperspektiv #minimalart #videoart #dfkt #pixelsorter #artistsvisual #glitchartoninstagram #glitchartscollective #glitcharts #glitchartistcommunity #glitchartwork #datamoshing #glitchartists #glitchartcommunity #glitchartistcollective #glitchartist #pixelsortingart #proceduralart #creativecodeart #pixelsortingeffect
On Monday, December 19th, we partnered with Lenovo computers to build out the ultimate art-themed smackdown. Hosted at Villain in Williamsburg, guests stepped into a fully imagined warehouse art party. That night it was all about participation. We created a series of art activities to get guests making art and meeting each other. Guests captured the revelry of the night in Ventikoland’s projection photo booth. After some savory Espolón cocktails and tacos the art battle was ready to begin. 2 amazing artists competed head-to-head in a series of timed challenges and a head-to-head battle of creative awesomeness. Interludes were provided by a pop & lock round girl, battling breakdancers, and a duo of beatboxers.
Event Design by Adam Aleksander Presents
Photography by Lukas Maverick Greyson
Cosmic revelations. Flight. Not the kind with peanuts and tray tables. I’m more about the kind where your soul leaves the ground and don’t ever look back. Take over the world!
And that brings me to a trumpet player from Chicago by way of Brooklyn a firestarter named Jaimie Branch.
Yeah, that’s right. Jaimie with an "ie." She wasn’t trying to be clever, she just was. A firebrand with copper lungs and a bell made of thunder. You might not find her on your dad’s jazz records — not yet — but put your ear to the rail, and you’ll hear her coming.
At first Branch studied piano but switched to trumpet and became excited with jazz’s improvisational possibilities. She played like she was building a new language, one phrase at a time, one scream, one whisper. Her horn didn’t just play music. It testified.
She called one of her records "Fly or Die." And yes, she meant it. Now that/those records is without doubt places you’ll never be able to find elsewhere. Take that one track Baba Louie or that other one Take Over the World. Oh me oh my. She flew. High. Loud. Furious. She made music for the folks in the back of the room, the ones who don’t clap unless it hurts a little. A fearless musician never afraid to enter the unknown. Jaimie wasn’t just blowing notes — she was conjuring storms. Political, personal, celestial. She’d throw down with a band like they were sparring partners, and her sound, oh yeeh, her sound had teeth. But there was joy in it too. Dirty, ragged joy. Like a busted trumpet found in a pawn shop that still remembered how to pray.
Jaimie Branch left this world too soon, a pity I never had the chance to see her live, at the age of 39 in 2022 from an accidental drug overdose. But I guess that’s the thing about flight, it don’t need to last forever to be eternal.
So here’s to Jaimie Branch —Trumpeter, composer, singer, conjurer. One hell of a flame that didn't just take the stage she took off.
You can still hear her flying.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com