“I have enormous respect for percussionist / composer / sonic adventure Lukas Ligeti and have enjoyed playing with him over the years in various situations, including my longtime band Gods and Monsters.
This live in the studio date was totally improvised and contains moments of transcendent beauty as well as sonic maelstroms of rabid noise. Lukas is my kind of collaborator!” — Gary Lucas

A world class guitar hero, a Grammy-nominated songwriter, an international recording artist, and a soundtrack composer for film and television, Gary Lucas is always on the move.

The former Captain Beefheart guitarist has recorded over 50 acclaimed albums to date in his own right in a variety of genres—jazz, rock, classical, folk, blues, avant-garde and world music—and has performed in over 40 countries—including the UK, Canada, Australia, all over Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, Israel, South Korea, Serbia, China, Russia, Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, Costa Rica, Taiwan, Morocco, India, and elsewhere.

Gary has received several Lifetime Achievement awards for his songwriting with Jeff Buckley (he co-wrote Jeff's anthems "Grace" and "Mojo Pin") and many honors—including performing solo before the General Assembly of the UN to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

He has performed and collaborated with a who's who of musical luminaries, including Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet), Jeff Buckley, Leonard Bernstein, Lou Reed, John Cale, Patti Smith, Chris Cornell, Bryan Ferry, Nona Hendryx, Fred Schneider, Los Van Van, Bob Weir, Nick Cave, Thurston Moore, Martha Wainwright, Camille O'Sullivan, Steve Kilbey, and many others, and he has given Masterclasses in guitar and songwriting at his alma mater Yale University, Columbia University, Rutgers University, the Amsterdam Musik Conservatorium, the Henri Dutilleux Conservatoire in Paris, The New School, and other academic institutions.

Dubbed "The Thinking Man's Guitar Hero" by The New Yorker, "The world's most popular avant-rock guitarist" by The Independent (UK), "One of the 100 Greatest Living Guitarists" (Classic Rock), "Legendary Leftfield guitarist" by The Guardian (UK), "Guitarist of 1000 Ideas" by The New York Times, "a true axe God" by Melody Maker, and "One of the five best guitarists in the world" by the national Czech newspaper Lidove Noviny; the British world music magazine fRoots recently described Gary Lucas as "without question, the most innovative and challenging guitarist playing today." Rolling Stone's David Fricke wrote: "Gary Lucas is one of the best and most original guitarists in America...a modern guitar miracle." Best-selling author/producer Dan Levitin ("This Is Your Brain On Music") recently cited Gary as "the greatest living electric guitarist". Gary was also dubbed "one of the world's greatest guitar players" by HITS Magazine. Pete Frame, music journalist, founder/editor of legendary UK music magazine ZigZag, and author/creator of 5 volumes of "Rock Family Trees" said of Gary, "Can there be another musician as adventurous, ingenious, accomplished, diverse, intrepid, hard-working and well-travelled as Gary Lucas?"

For more information, please see www.garylucas.com

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Lukas Ligeti is an Austrian/American composer, drummer, and researcher whose innovative music combines influences from the western classical canon, African music, jazz, electronics, the American experimental tradition, and many others sources. Special interests include polymetric and polytempo structures, non- tempered tunings, and the development of new performance practices through unconventional uses of technology. Lukas studied at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, received his PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and has taught at the University of California, Irvine (as a core member of the PhD program in Integrated Composition, Improvisation. and Technology), the University of Pretoria (as an Extraordinary Professor) and at the University of Ghana (jointly with J.H. Kwabena Nketia). He is currently Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles in Belgium.

A recipient of the CalArts Alpert Award in Music, his compositions have been commissioned by Ars Musica (Brussels), the Vienna Festwochen, American Composers Orchestra, MDR Symphony Orchestra Leipzig, Ensemble Modern, Eighth Blackbird, the Bang On A Can All Stars, the Kronos Quartet, Håkan Hardenberger, Colin Currie, and Ji Hye Jung, and his music has also been performed by the Brussels Philharmonic, Basel Sinfonietta, Gürzenich Orchester Cologne, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lyon, Vienna Radio Symphony, the London Sinfonietta, Avanti! (Helsinki), the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Amadinda Percussion Group, and countless others.

As a drummer, he has performed and/or recorded with artists such as John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Henry Kaiser, John Tchicai, Marilyn Crispell, George Lewis, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, etc., and has given solo concerts on electronic percussion at festivals on five continents. He has been listed repeatedly as a talent deserving wider recognition in Downbeat magazine’s Critics Poll.

He co-founded the groups Beta Foly (Côte d'Ivoire) and Burkina Electric (Burkina Faso) and has worked in many other countries across Africa, leading to an approach he refers to as experimental intercultural collaboration. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and at Sonoscopia in Porto, Portugal. CDs of his music have been released by New World, Tzadik, Cantaloupe, Intuition, Innova, col legno, and other labels. For more information, please see www.lukasligeti.com

Next to Walt Disney, Max Fleischer is the best-known animator of the 20th century, creating and contributing to American culture the one and only Betty Boop. Fleischer Studios also brought the newspaper character Popeye The Sailor and all the characters of that universe to (animated) life.

Guitarist Gary Lucas, whose dauntingly eclectic career encompasses a formative stint with Captain Beefheart, a collaboration with Jeff Buckley very early in Jeff's career and a recent duo album with underground singer/songwriter legend Peter Hammill was once called "the guitarist of a thousand ideas" by The New York Times. Lucas has long been a fan of Fleischer's work and has wished to develop a band to present the music that was used in these cartoons.

The music and era conjured up by the group is a gleaming confection from a hurly-burly era when the Jazz Age crashed into the Great Depression and Tin Pan Alley borrowed shamelessly from Harlem. To create the small band arrangements, Lucas enlisted virtuoso trombonist and arranger Joe Fiedler to craft zingy, modern-but-historically-grounded arrangements and to bring in a brilliant group of players, each one at home with the traditional as well as the exploratory: saxist Jeff Lederer, double bassist Michael Bates and drummer Rob Garcia.

Casting the cats was the easy part. Finding a singer who could capture the insouciant spirit of these characters while comfortably inhabiting the material proved far more difficult. Lucas turned to his wife, a New York City casting director, who said, "why don’t you let me cast this one?" "That was a good idea", Lucas says. Tony Award-nominated, musical theater vocalist (on and off Broadway) Sarah Stiles, who embodies both the sophisticated and sexy Betty and her gawky, neurotic, loveable counterpart, Olive Oyl, was clearly the right choice. "Sarah is really a bundle of fire who can do it all. It was crucial to find a singer who wouldn’t try to hijack the idea and make it about her." Part of what makes Stiles such a perfect fit for the material is the way she captures the spirit of the characters. It’s immediately obvious when she’s singing a song associated with the effervescent Ms. Boop and when she’s donning the slippery guise of Ms. Oyl.

Hewing closely to the original scores, Lucas and his crew summon a lost world of rent parties and Yiddish music halls, Vaudeville emporiums, Broadway revues, and even klezmer dance parties. With Fleischerei, Lucas, Stiles and group have created a particularly vivid and entrancing realm, a musical world that’s uncannily familiar and tantalizingly foreign like only the past can be.