Logjam Presents is excited to welcome back Portland Cello Project to The Wilma for a live performance on Saturday, April 20, 2019.
Tickets are on sale now at The Top Hat, online or by phone at 1 (800) 514-3849. General admission cabaret style floor seating and reserved premium balcony tickets are available. All ages are welcome.
Additional ticketing and venue information can be found here.
About This Event
After a year of performing Radiohead’s OK Computer in its entirety with a large orchestral ensemble in symphony halls and grand theaters all over the country, Portland Cello Project goes back to its roots this April, warming up a uniquely intimate show in clubs and small venues.
The program is a diverse mixture of music they’re calling Radiohead, Coltrane and Bach, for which the usually-sheet-music-reading, classically trained cellists spent a few months memorizing their set and adopting some of the improvisational skills of non-cellist collaborators who have become a mainstay of the group. Joining forces with vocalist Patti King (The Shins), drummer Tyrone Hendrix (Prince, Stevie Wonder), and trumpeter Farnell Newton (Bootsie Collins, Jill Scott), expect a program of the unexpected, as unpredictable as the Oregon weather in the springtime, performed with a new sound and soul.
“A core philosophy of the group has been to break down traditional barriers that you tend to find between classical musicians and their audience,” says Cello Project Artistic Director, Douglas Jenkins. “This next evolution of the group – to remove the sheet music from the stage, even for classical pieces like the Elgar Cello Concerto – has proven to not only remove the music stand as a visual barrier between the performers and the audience, but also to build a new connection between the performers. We now know this repertoire so intimately, our eyes are free to look at each other and feel more connected musically than we ever have before.”
About Portland Cello Project
In the fall of 2006 a group of 9 cellists got on stage at Portland’s Doug Fir Lounge to perform western classical music in an informal setting.
Many of the cellists that night thought it would only happen once.
But slowly that one-off event became a second, and a third, cellists joined and left and rejoined the group again, to perform in Portland’s most popular clubs. By 2009 the group had evolved into a nationally-recognized performing, recording and educational group with a revolving cast of cellists. Cello Project (or PCP as their fans affectionately call them) were quickly appearing anywhere and everywhere in North America, from punk rock clubs to symphony halls, from street parties to exclusive private events. By 2010 self-described horde of cellos were spending more than a quarter of the year touring, featuring a diverse repertoire that quickly ballooned to over 1,000 pieces of music.
Under the artistic direction of Douglas Jenkins, the group grew and evolved, working with an all-star group of cellists in the Pacific Northwest (Skip vonKuske, Diane Chaplin, Nancy Ives, Gideon Freudmann, Kevin Jackson, to name just a few…). The group developed a three-part philosophy that has mostly remained unchanged over the years:
To bring the cello places you wouldn’t normally see it (from wild dance parties, to formal symphony halls, to street parties, to Millennium Park in Chicago…).
To perform music on the cello you wouldn’t normally associate with the instrument alongside music from the Western Classical Tradition (from Pantera to Taylor Swift to Kanye West to Elliott Smith, alongside Bach, Rossini, and Saint-Saens, to name just a few…).
To build bridges between different musical communities through educational, community outreach, and through collaboration with myriad artists, from The Dandy Warhols to Garrison Keillor to Ural Thomas to Corin Tucker (Sleater-Kinney) to Jolie Holland to Peter Yarrow (Peter, Paul and Mary), among many others, and cellists such as Ben Sollee, Maya Beiser and Zoe Keating.