Miss Legere will be appearing at.....

Phoebe Legere, photo by Susan Rakowski

Miss Legere will be appearing at:

IRIDIUM

Jan.18th

with her Quartet

The Ooh La La Coq Tail

PLUS: Legere's glorious, vividly colored paintings of nudes, children and animals in hyper real dream like settings of complete insanity splashed across 5 wide screens...

(whitehot | June 2008, Interview with Phoebe Legere)

The Demystification of Phoebe Legere: Language and Light
Kofi Forson interviews Phoebe Legere

Phoebe Legere (her real name) was a fixture in the East Village, New York counter culture of the 1980’s. Her song Marilyn Monroe was featured on the soundtrack to the movie Mondo New York, a depiction of New York underground. Her background in music and performance art has led to her role as resident composer for the Wooster Group. She received a NYSCA grant to write The Queen of New England, an experimental multimedia opera about the Massachusetts Native American Holocaust in 2001. Hello Mrs. President, a multi-character live art work about the first African American woman president of the United States was presented at Theater of New City. Her text, Waterclown, about the formative movements of fluids, music by Morgan Powell, with the Cleveland Chamber Symphony was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Music 2000. Dark Energy, her astrophysics poem, music by Eric Mandat, was performed at the University of Illinois at Carbondale in November 2004. She has made numerous appearances on television and radio and worked as Artist in Residence at the School of Visual Arts Computer Art MFA department and at the University of Victoria Graduate School of Engineering and Music, among other achievements of inventions and interventions. Collaboration with Eno and Leo Abrahams called Ultra Romantic Parallel Universe will be released on Mercury Records.

Kofi Forson: Phoebe, I look at you I think you were the creation of a whimsical Italian filmmaker…Only he hung out at the Limelight and listened to Professor Long Hair. (Laughter)
Phoebe Legere: Oh Kofi! I see why you have so many friends…you make everyone feel famous, hot and glamorous!
KF: Phoebe your works of art include many different forms of media: film, music, installation, electronics, performance… Can you talk a bit about the gathering of the conscience to fulfill such a multiplicity of thought and action within an artistic scope?

PL: I AM A TRANSMEDIA ARTIST. My hybrid artform explores the reciprocal relationships between disciplines in an interaction of location, science, music, painting, television and gender. I frame music in layers of visual art.
KF: Why the fascination with the female body?

PL: I am obsessed with human anatomy. My parents were artists. They taught life drawing classes and encouraged me to draw from live nude models when I was 6 years old. The nude is in my blood. I put many figures in my paintings, to show a multiplicity of angles, features, and aspects of the figure. Eskimo Art, African Art and cubism all do the same thing, I paint generative energy. Even the vegetal and architectonic motifs of my pictorial grammar are rooted in a feverish longing for love and sexual communion…

KF: Much of which I think is circumstantially rooted in our psyche not as sexual creatures but fundamentally given our hybridity and need to survive within the politics of a city… love and sex take on a whole new meaning.

PL: The representation of sex in my paintings is a sign of the miraculous, spiritual power of creativity…I paint skin longing for skin, for connection, for the power of the Other, for the total dissolution of ego structures, I load my brush with fluid from the Universe of Supreme Love.
KF: This then again brings to front the exigency in our current sexual structure. Does the libido warrant such excitement that a woman is able to have more than one partner?

PL: Monogamy is hypocrisy, an outmoded creed, a total fiction propped up by an exhausted system of laws and values. But hey, don’t think that I’m a swinger! It’s all happening in my imagination. I am very shy.

KF: (Laughter)

PL: Don’t laugh! All my art is a sublimation of instincts so passionate that they would tear me apart! For people who have trouble comprehending that my art is a multivalent sign, may I remind you that among the Navaho, there are special medicine men who do the elaborate sand paintings that cure illnesses. These medicine painters are always called Singers….The Sand Paintings of the Navaho only exist from Sunrise to Sunset. The gallery system can do violence to the creativity of the artists. Art works become trapped in the viscous, fluorescent netherworld of the Institution.

Art needs air. This is why I became so deeply involved in Live Art Performance. Art should be like a meal prepared by your mother. You eat it, you love her, it disappears, on to the next meal. That’s healthy art, can’t we get beyond commodification? It’s 2008 already. In the Navaho world you sit on the sand painting and you are cured of your illness. I’d love to sit on Les Desmoiselles D’Avignon. I would feel so much better. Picasso worked on that painting for months.

It is about Sacred Prostitutes. Picasso really knew the score: Abstraction is figuration. Painting is always about the body. Go back to Balzac’s story Le Chef D’Oeuvre Inconnu. The centerpiece of that story is St. Mary of Egypt. Check it out. She is the root of Cezanne and Picasso’s abstraction. You can get it at Project Gutenberg. It’s better in French.

KF: I have to say the delight of Phoebe Legere is more than just the looks. We’ve come far from Betty Page. You are actually a very serious artist.

PL: In my art I seek to restore myself to wholeness, and to integrate myself with the totality of Space, and Time. Much of my recent work is based on Science. I have been writing and painting about the parallels between Darwinian Creation Myths and the Creation stories of the Penobscot/Abenaki people of Maine. There are stunning similarities.
KF: Your drawings and paintings have gorgeous swirls and vortices, eddies and currents…the fluid line of your brush is like the energy trail of a cascading river.
PL: It’s true, I love curves. But sometimes I am seduced by squares and rectangles... I love beautiful houses, I love beautiful cities, I love speculative modern furniture. I had a show last year at the Patterson Art Museum called, Homage to Barney Newman—lots of squares and rectangles, and I did a video for the S.V.A. Digital Salon called Chromatic Wave Cantata that used colored squares and rectangles as vessels for “Chromatic sensations.”

Ultimately what woman in her right mind prefers a square to a circle? For decades the Modern Artist has been forced into the role of geometer, installation conceptualist, or arbiter elegantiarum. Artists must break away from enforced Puritanism. I abhor the desiccated, circuit -driven visual tricks taking up space in so many galleries and museums.

My whole life has been an attempt to visualize and invoke images that point to a higher reality. I can achieve higher cognitive levels through painting, drumming, singing, writing poetry and dance…

On stage I am in a trance. When I perform people think they are hearing me. But it’s not me. I come from an ecstatic tradition of shamanic performance. Art is medicine. Art is better than Ayuhuasca.

In my Celebrity Blow Job series, and Phallocrata Symphonium series, I have reclaimed the phallus as a personal signifier. For many years I have used my own body as a brush, as an instrument, as a poem. Now I am a female penis, thrusting myself into total art synthesis.

KF: More can be said about society’s feminine sphere having undergone something similar as in the labia becoming penial. You’re on to something. (Sigh) Can you please explain the origin of Phoebe Legere. What set of circumstances created this living, breathing example of Brigitte Bardot in the film… And God Created Woman? Or even the Marilyn Monroe reference. Is that where it all started?

PL: Marilyn and the young Brigitte were Magic Blond Women; beautifully lit, impeccably coiffed and flawlessly styled. Marilyn died before I was born, but I saw Some Like It Hot on TV. I was overwhelmed. I fell asleep, and I had a dream in which Marilyn cradled me in her arms and sang my song Marilyn Monroe. I woke up and wrote it down.

The lyrics unfolded with a kind of dream logic. I believe Marilyn composed it in another dimension and bequeathed it to me. Marilyn was an avatar of art and love. (Sigh) At the time I was signed to Epic/Sony Records. I submitted the song to the label. They said, “First we find out you are an American Indian, then we find out you play the accordion, and now this…you are a lesbian!” (The song is about making love to Marilyn Monroe.)They dropped me from the label.

Thank you very much. I knew my life was over, so I just laughed it off and booked Carnegie Hall for my debut as a composer…It worked. Once I was off the label, and out from under the corporate thumb, I immediately began to get famous. And it wasn’t a hype driven artificial fame, it was the real, old-fashioned kind of Flame—I mean fame (Laughter)—I kept singing my song, Marilyn Monroe. 

The Marilyn song seemed to have a strange demon attached to it. When you pierce the membrane and stick your hand into a parallel universe you have to be careful, there are billions of demons in billions of worlds. They are all begging for our attention. Hobgoblins are by nature greedy and narcissistic. They want to be famous just like you do. They cling. Songs are built from mathematical codes.  Long complex DNA codes create complex living creatures, but short strips of code create viruses that are half dead and half alive, some songs are like that, they are short strips of numerical code that have a kind of prong that enters the brain. They’re “special.” They don’t die. My song Marilyn was like a virus and I knew it. (Sigh). 

Anyway, after Epic booted me out for being a gay Indian, I spent all my money on a recording and video of that song. Yeah, yeah I should have bought a building on the Bowery, but a seductive little voice kept whispering, “Phoebe, record my song.” And in those days, 1988–9 recording costs were astronomical. I spent $20,000 recording four songs, 24 track. Nobody under 30 remembers this era because now it costs 3 cents to record a song.

Sigh).Within two weeks Marilyn Monroe was immediately picked up by Island Records for the soundtrack of the film Mondo New York. It became a huge hit on college radio—with no promotion! And me with no manager, no agent, and now, no record company! (Sigh) You don’t want to hear what I know about the music industry: The drugs, the lies, the corruption, the sexual harassment. That’s where I spent my teenage years; in a putrid snake pit.

Complete on: http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/2008-interview-with-phoebe-legere/1435

Phoebe Legere - Amazing...like a superhero...people part the Red Sea for her...

The Phoebe Legere Quintet - The Ooh La La Coq Tail

Phoebe Legere, is a jazz composer, pianist, singer and multi-instrumentalist of French Canadian, Mayflower Pilgrim and Native American descent.

She has played with Warren Vache, John Zorn, Don Cherry, Cecil Payne, Charles ‘Bo Bo’ Shaw, Frank Vignola, Earl May, Dennis Charles, Greg Haynes, Billy Joel, Joni Mitchell, Rufus Thomas, John Hartford, Ikue Morie, Morgan Powell, Howie Smith, Jim Staley, Larry Rivers and David Bowie. Legere studied composition with Morton Subotnick, Dinu Gezzo, and Milton Babbitt protege Wayne Oquin; and jazz with John Lewis of MJQ, Ira Newborn, and Rich Shemaria.

The New York Times wrote:
'Phoebe Legere plays the piano with enormous authority in a style that encompasses Chopin, blues, ragtime, bebop and beyond, and she brings to her vocal delivery a four and a half octave range, and an extraordinary palette of tonal color and meticulous phrasing.'

Legere started playing the piano at age 3, composed her first song at 6, started playing organ in the church at 9, studied piano at New England Conservatory and sang with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at 16. As a teenager Legere was signed to Epic Records. Phoebe Legere first gained the attention of jazz piano aficionados during her decade-long jazz piano residency at One Fifth Avenue. At midnight, after the gig, Phoebe moved farther downtown, experimenting with new musical forms, electronics and modalities of interdisciplinary performance. Monad, a philosophical concept which means “One,” was Legere's seminal Loisaida jazz/classical/electronic experimental art band.

In 2000 Legere co-wrote a work called The Waterclown for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. (TNC Recordings) She wrote three epic poems and, in collaboration with the Tone Road Ramblers, a composing collective, set them to music. Dark Energy, The Prairie, Common Root of All Organisms are all available on Einstein Records.

In 2001, Legere recorded a CD that combined experimental electronics, Afro beat, Native American music and blues called “Blue Curtain” (Einstein Records) In 2002, she won a NYSCA grant to compose an opera about the Native American holocaust called The Queen of New England and in 2004 she wrote and produced a musical called Hello Mrs. President about the first woman President of color.

In recent years Legere returned to school: to study orchestration, conducting and film scoring at Juilliard and NYU graduate school. In 2009 she conducted the New York Film Orchestra playing her composition 'Dark Harbor for Ved Mehta.”

Phoebe Legere has played at Carnegie Hall, the Algonquin, and CBGB’S. She has sung with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and with Frank Vignola’s Hot Club USA. As 'Phoebe Songbundle' she has sung and played to thousands of children in Native American education programs.

Legere was the resident composer for the Wooster Group and she has written music for downtown film, theater, and dance companies. She is now the Composer in Residence at the Theater for the New City.
Phoebe's Native American name is 'Songbundle' and indeed, she has written a thousand songs including college radio hit 'Marilyn Monroe,' and many songs for other recording artists including mega platinum Sony artist Kelly Chan.

Last year she wrote and played on a CD with Brian Eno: her song “Ultra Romantic Parallel Universe” (2009) is available on Mercury England. In the USA she has recorded for Epic, Island, Funtone, Mysterious Ways and Einstein records. She has an extensive discography, both as a composer and a collaborator. Her bass player and friend for 20 years was the late Earl May, the left handed bass player on Coltrane's Lush Life album. Earl May was a founding member of Legere's 9 piece band, Swingalicious.

Her new band is called The Ooh La La Coq Tail. 'I'm putting Musette, Jazz and Blues together. For the past 10 years I've been making New Classical, Native American, and Experimental Jazz records, using invented instruments, wearable computers, and adventurous open structures. Suddenly, I felt like going back to basics: hand - made, virtuosic, and very American jazz music sung in that very North American language: French.'
The Ooh La La Coq Tail plays everything from Duke Ellington to Gershwin to Abenaki/Penobscot traditionals to the music of Phoebe Legere.

From: http://www.arielpublicity.net/login
Sara Dudine
sara@arielpublicity.com
Christina Duren
christina@arielpublicity.com

Phoebe Legere: Her hybrid artform explores the reciprocal relationships .....

PHOEBE LEGERE is a TRANSMEDIA ARTIST. She uses many different forms of media: film, music, installation, electronics, paint, circuits, invented instruments, traditional instruments, performance art, poetry, costumes and movement.

Her hybrid artform explores the reciprocal relationships between disciplines in an interaction of location, science, music, painting, television and gender. The New York Times noted that Legere "plays the piano with enormous authority in a style that encompasses Chopin, blues, ragtime, bebop and beyond, and she brings to her vocal delivery a four and a half octave range, and an extraordinary palette of tonal color and meticulous phrasing." Interview Magazine called her "a genius." Billboard Magazine raved, "She is the female Frank Zappa!." Where Magazine called her a "brilliant songwriter." Variety said, "Phoebe Legere is a superb singer." But Legere is both an artist and a composer: she often frames music in layers of visual meaning.

Phoebe Legere's parents were both visual artists. Her grandparents were all musicians. Phoebe started playing the piano at age 3. She started oil painting at age 5. Legere composed her first song, "Grasshopper Willy" at age 6. PHOEBE LEGERE is a dynamic performer on piano, accordion, Native American flute, and synthesizer, with a four and half octave vocal range. She has a highly creative approach to mixing jazz, classical, rock and Native American music.

Legere was still a teenager when she became the resident composer for the Wooster Group which included Spaulding Grey and Willem Defoe. She then went on to study with John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Legere graduated from Vassar College, studied composition at the Juilliard School, studied piano at the New England Conservatory, attended NYU Graduate School of Music Composition. She was signed to Epic Records, had her Carnegie Hall debut and opened for David Bowie on his National Tour in 1991. She led highly influential downtown rock bands, from Monad, to Ultra Monad, To Blond Fox, to the 4 Nurses of the Apocalypse.

During the past decade, Legere has dedicated her creative energy to adventurous, genre bending serious music composition. In 2001 she received a NYSCA grant to write"The Queen of New England", an experimental multimedia opera about the Massachusetts Native American Holocaust. She presented a concert reading at Roulette. Her "Children of the Dawn" CD features 10,000 year old traditional medicine chants. Children of the Dawn is a collaboration with Little Hawk, a Micmac elder. Her musical,"Hello Mrs. President", about the first African American woman president of the United States, was presented at Theater of the New City in 2004.

Legere was Artist in Residence at the School of Visual Arts Computer Art MFA department in 2003 and at the University of Victoria Graduate School of Engineering and Music in 2004. Legere collaborated with the Morgan Powell and the Tone Road Ramblers, a collective composing and music ensemble. "The Waterclown", about the formative movements of fluids, was performed with the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2000. Legere has also collaborated with Eric Mandat on "Dark Energy" (2004), an astrophysics oratorio.

The texts for these long form musical works are poems written by Legere. Legere also collaborated with master trombonist Jim Staley. Their CD Blind Pursuits and Blue Curtain are available on Einstein Records.
"The Common Root of All Organisms" is Legere's epic poem about the parallels between Darwinian creation theories and Penobscot Abenaki Creation Myths. That CD is out now on Einstein Records.

Legere developed an assistive device for disabled children called the Rap Shoes. She then incorporated her invention into her live art performances. Her Sneakers of Samothrace 4.0, a wearable computer for music and art improvisation, were presented at a lecture/performance at IRCAM's Resonances Aux Festival in Paris in 2004 and at STEIM electronic music foundation in Amsterdam, Holland in 2006. ADIDAS SALOMON financed a second pair of Legere's Rap Shoes. The sneakers can be seen and heard on YOUTUBE and in an upcoming Roulette TV show.

In 2007 her visual music work, Chromatic Wave Cantata was featured in the SVA Digital Salon. In 2007 Legere had a solo show called "A Few Words From My Intestine" about Veganism, Raw Food, and the ecology of the human digestive tract. In 2008 Roulette Intermedium will release a Live DVD concert by Legere called "The Imaginary Opera."

Legere has released seven CDs of original music, and has appeared on National Public Radio, CBS Sunday Morning, PBSs City Arts, and Charlie Rose. Legere is head writer and host for Roulette TV, a NYC show about experimental art and music. She records for Einstein Records, a label known for experimental and adventurous music.

Legere occasionally takes jobs in movies and television shows to support her highly original artistic projects. Most recently she was seen on Nickelodeon in the comic children's show, The Naked Brothers Band." Legere has a new CD single on Mercury Records called "Ultra Romantic Parallel Universe" which is a collaboration with Leo Abrahams. The album is called Unrest Cure.

Presentation

April 13, 2010 - The Ooh La La Coq Tail

Phoebe Legere

Aaron Weinstein
John Burr
Elvis Sinatra