Three Red Crowns A Baltimore-based Ensemble playing the works of John Paul Carillo & Anna Meadors
About
The composers, John Paul Carillo and Anna Meadors, met at a Baltimore basement improv session, and immediately found sounds worth pursuing. The week after their first jam, John and Anna formed SuperSharpShooter, a trio blending jazz and epic-rock that later, out of want for greater expression and dynamic range, blossomed into Three Red Crowns.
Anna Meadors, saxophone, has been playing for the past ten years, and during this time has come to practice, perform, experiment with and love all kinds of music. Jazz, new music, rock, classical, funk, blues, world music—anything is open for this young saxophonist. As the adminstrative assistant for the Mobtown Modern Music Series, working with curator Brian Sacawa, she is exposed to and inspired by many styles of contemporary music. A recent graduate from the Peabody Institute, Anna studied contemporary classical saxophone with Gary Louie and she has performed in the Peabody Jazz Orchestra for the past four years under the direction of Mike Formanek, studied jazz saxophone with Gary Thomas and composition with David Smooke.
John Paul Carillo has released three CDs, on the Vorgon Massive label, with New York epic-rock duo devL. The culmination of his work with devL is a collaborative twenty-two minute track entitled “Invention of Monsters”, a piece that begins with an aggressive development of a single three root theme, then opens up, transforming into a soundtrack with three distinct acts and a coda (the coda recorded live and mastered onto the mix). Inspired by Robert Fripp and King Crimson, Orbital, Led Zeppelin, and Music for 18 Musicians, John learned, by obsessive listening, and twenty years of playing, some of the tricks of the crossover trade.
Anna and John introduced each other to their individual obsessions, which became, through the art of collaborative composition, shared obsessions. These collaborations produce music you listen to with the body, recapture with the intellect; music that one can take out from the ensemble space into the city streets, walk with through the heat of the day; or down a lunar lit forest path, the stars out, a sickle moon slicing through midnight…music that is immediate…with reverberations that are like waking up out of a dream….