Today, Wild Up — the "equally euphoric and daring" (NPR Music) Los Angeles contemporary music ensemble — released 'Julius Eastman Vol. 4: The Holy Presence' via New Amsterdam Records.
Julius Eastman was young, gay, and Black at a time when it was even more difficult to be young, gay, and Black. He swerved through academia, discos, Europe, Carnegie Hall, and the downtown experimental music scene. And in 1990, at age 49, Eastman died in Buffalo, New York, less than a decade after the New York City Sheriff’s Department threw his scores, belongings, and ephemera into the East Village snow.
Wild Up’s Eastman anthology represents a departure for New Amsterdam Records, which, until Femenine and Joy Boy, had exclusively released new music by active, living composers. But Eastman is a special case, a composer whose music shines like a beacon to today’s musical creators. Any term used to characterize today’s musical landscape — ”genre-fluid,” or the like — was anticipated by Eastman decades before; yet he was punished for being ahead of his time, both in the treatment of his music and, tragically, his person. Eastman’s music flowed freely from, and through, his myriad influences, and was terribly served by the musical infrastructure of his day. (At the time of his death, it took some eight months for a newspaper, any newspaper, to run his obituary). It makes sense, then, for Wild Up’s Eastman anthology to arrive on New Amsterdam Records, a sort of loving backward embrace of a musical torchbearer to 21st-century composers.
You can enjoy an album release party tonight, featuring Wild Up’s cellist and Eastman scholar Seth Parker Woods playing his new version of the title piece for cello and electronics in Beverly Hills. Before you head out, listen to and get your copy of 'The Holy Presence', by Wild Up, at the link in bio.
#newamrecords #juliuseastman #wildup #theholypresence 
