Free jazz concert by Joe Sheehan and his collective Kinetic, blending global folk traditions with modern jazz in 'Music for Distant & Fabled Lands'.
Joe Sheehan & Kinetic bring Music for Distant & Fabled Lands to Alphabet City on Thursday, November 19, from 7 PM to 8:30 PM. The set is built around maps and imaginary places, taking its cue from Umberto Eco's The Book of Legendary Lands and Sheehan's own love of maps. It looks at the ambition to chart the unknown and rediscover lost utopias, but also the darker side of that impulse: the drive to partition the world into spaces to be conquered and ruled.
Sheehan is a pianist, composer, and educator whose work sits at the intersection of jazz, global folk, and classical traditions. At the center of that is Kinetic, the music collective he founded to blend global folk traditions with modern jazz. The group has released two albums, Dances of Lake Volta and Songs of Lake Volta, which weave Ghanaian folk song into Sheehan's original compositions. His playing is rooted in Pittsburgh's historic jazz scene, and his writing draws on immersive field research of folk music as well as university studies in classical composition. He's performed alongside jazz masters, traditional music experts, classical ensembles, rappers, poets, and pop/R&B musicians.
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For this show, Kinetic is a quartet: Joseph Seman on saxophone, bansuri, and flute; Joseph Sheehan on piano and vocals; Denzel Chismar-Oliver on bass; and James Johnson III on drums. The bansuri—a transverse flute from the Indian subcontinent—adds another global texture to the mix, fitting for a set that draws from folk traditions as much as from jazz. The music will run from 7 PM to 8:30 PM at Alphabet City, 40 W. North Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15212. Admission is free, with both in-person and livestream tickets available.
