Michael Snow and I first met the day of our duo piano concert January 13, 2014 to kick off his retrospective exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum. The recording of that concert was released on Edgetone Records later that year and will also be featured in the documentary Fields Of Snow by director Laurie Kwasnik that is in production presently.
Michael Snow was born in Toronto (1928) where he currently lives and works. He has been active as a visual artist and as a musician since 1948. His paintings, sculpture, films, videos, photoworks, holograms, and sound installations are in the collections of Museum of Modern Art (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Tate (London), Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and many others. He has made many public sculptures including Flight Stop (1979) at Eaton Centre, The Audience (1989) at Roger's Centre, Lightline (2016) at the St. Regis Building, all in Toronto. Recent exhibitions include Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Guggenheim Bilbao, MoMA and sound-based exhibitions at Culturgest (Lisbon, 2018) and Art Museum University of Toronto (2020).
Michael Snow began playing piano professionally in jazz bands in the late 1940s. He was later involved with the development of free playing in Jazz, commissioning Albert Ayler and others to play on the soundtrack for his 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Control. Since the 1960’s, he has been playing in free improvisation ensembles. In 1974, he co-founded Toronto’s Music Gallery and the CCMC, which was the resident band until the early 2000’s. CCMC has released numerous records, tapes and CDs, toured internationally and continues to perform. He has also composed music, sometimes for recorded media, such as Musics for Piano, Whistling, Microphone and Tape Recorder (1975), The Last LP (1987) and for live performance, such as Hue Chroma Tint (1999) for the Burdocks Ensemble and EVƎ (2016) a solo piano work for Eve Egoyan. In 2000, a 3-CD box-set of selections of his recorded solo piano work was released as Snow Solo Piano Solo Snow – 3 Phases. Recently, he has given solo piano performances in Paris, Tokyo and in Vienna, which is the subject of a concert film entitled Snow In Vienna. Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra commissioned and premiered his orchestral work in 2018, entitled Prophecy. A music-based documentary, Fields of Snow by dir. Laurie Kwasnik, is currently in production.
credits
released September 30, 2021
Michael Snow, Piano
Thollem, Piano
Recorded by Laurie Kwasnik at Array Music in Toronto, CA
November 28th, 2019
Mastered by Drake Hardin
Cover art by ACVilla
Layout by Tiny Little Hammers/Dylan Marcus McConnell
supported by 13 fans who also own “Thollem / Michael Snow”
The energy contained within each of these tracks was just what I was looking for although I couldn’t possibly have known that until I found it! Exhilarating, exciting and enthralling! Jimmy Wunts
supported by 13 fans who also own “Thollem / Michael Snow”
Sweet noisy avant-garde jazz with a rocky edge and a punk spirit, not to mention plenty of non-standard instrumentation and a good sense of humour. DoomZappo
