Joe Fiedler / Open Sesame
Peekskill, NY
Grant amount: $4,299
Performances
Next Stage Arts. Putney, VT. 11/19/2021
Bop Shop. Rochester, NY. 11/20/2021
The Linda, WAMC's Performing Arts Studio. Albany, NY. 11/21/2021
About the Artist
Since moving to New York in 1993, Fiedler has become one of the first-call trombonists in the world, featured on more than 150 recordings. He’s had extensive experience in the heart of the flowering big band scene, playing with Maria Schneider, the Mingus Big Band, Andrew Hill, Jason Lindner, Dafnis Prieto, Kenny Wheeler, Satoko Fujii, Miguel Zenón and many more. In smaller units he’s played with Lee Konitz, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Myra Melford, David Weiss’s Endangered Species and a host of others.
Owing to his long experience in pit bands, salsa groups and countless other professional settings, Fiedler had the opportunity to play trombone on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show In the Heights. The show’s orchestrator, Tony Award-winning Bill Sherman enlisted Fiedler for the newly revived children’s show Electric Company. After three seasons, Sherman and Fiedler made the transition in 2009 to Sesame Street. From playing 350 gigs a year on the freelance circuit, Fiedler officially became a Sesame Street music director, working on what would become hundreds of song arrangements and thousands of underscoring cues.
His latest project, Open Sesame, grapples with the legacy of the storied show of which he’s become an integral part. For Open Sesame, Fiedler reimagines the timeless music of Joe Raposo, Jeffrey Moss and others on his own terms, with help from tasteful hell-raisers Jeff Lederer, Steven Bernstein (of Sex Mob fame), Michael Sarin and Sean Conly. To date, Open Sesame has recorded two CDs, their eponymous debut in 2019 and the upcoming Fuzzy and Blue to be released in November 2021. The band has toured together previously, with the first being a three city Northeastern US tour in support of their debut recording in 2019. In August of 2019, with varied personnel, Open Sesame did a three-city tour in Australia followed by a short two gig tour in Austria in December of that year.
The New York Times has pinpointed a “feeling for a rugged but jaunty experimentalism” in the music of trombone veteran Joe Fiedler, a figure as esteemed in New York jazz circles as he is in the Afro-Caribbean and pop scenes. He’s an adventurous improviser and bandleader whose small-band outings include The Crab, Sacred Chome Orb, Joe Fiedler Plays the Music of Albert Mangelsdorff, I’m In and Like, Strange. His three releases by the unique low-brass unit Big Sackbut — a trombone/tuba corollary of sorts to the World Saxophone Quartet — have also cemented Fiedler’s reputation as a musical thinker with boundless imagination.