Kip Hanrahan / A Thousand Nights and a Night (2 - Silver Nights)
Jazz Road Creative Residencies Grant Recipient
Recipient Information
Location
Reston, Virginia
Year of Award
2021
Grant or Fellowship
Jazz Road Creative Residencies Grant
Grant Amount
$40,000
About the Project
Write and record next two volumes of artist's "A Thousand Nights" work which became known as the Arabian Nights, in the mid-1980’s and produced three recordings. The newly assembled large ensemble includes some of today's most notable Latin jazz artists and will also include vocalists Carmen Lundy and Xiomara Laugart. Author Ishmael Reed will contribute lyrics for three of the songs.
Residency location
Brooklyn NY
About the Artist
Kip Hanrahan is a composer, lyricist and record producer. He founded american clave Music in 1979 to create music free of the artistic and financial constraints of the major record labels and to work with musicians using the vocabulary of jazz, Latin and popular music. The current american clave catalog is comprised of 36 recordings all produced by Hanrahan and the label has been an artistic home for a wide range of composers and musicians including Astor Piazzolla, Don Pullen, Steve Swallow, Allen Toussaint, Jack Bruce and Charles Neville. It is also the platform for Hanrahan’s extensive compositional work, represented on 16 titles in the catalog.
Hanrahan’s first recordings were hailed as “genre-bending” in their blend of jazz, Latin (Cuban and Haitian), rock, and poetry, and his work is consistently cited as a precursor to the “world music” phenomenon. LeMonde (Paris) called Coup de Tete (1981) “a record which will begin an epoch.” Desire Develops an Edge was chosen as “One of the 100 most important records of the century"" by Telerama (France, 1999) and was praised in Le Monde, “…Desire Develops an Edge is not the record of the year, 1984 will be the year of Desire..."". The New York Times chose Days and Nights as one of the top ten records of 1988; The Boston Globe and Spin magazine picked Vertical’s Currency as one of 1985's Ten Best Records. A Thousand Nights and a Night was selected “Choc de L’Annee” (record of the year) in 1998 by Jazzman, the pre-eminent jazz magazine in Europe.
Hanrahan composed two soundtracks for films based on the lives of poets: Every Child is Born a Poet: The Life and Work of Piri Thomas (2003), and Pinero (2001). His score for Every Child was awarded the Charles Schwartz Award for Exemplary Use of Music by Film Festival New Haven in 2004, and Jazziz chose Pinero as one of 2001’s ten best records.
In the past two decades, Hanrahan has produced recordings by Jack Bruce, Silvana DeLuigi, Horacio Hernandez and Robby Ameen, Conjure (featuring Ishmael Reed) and Tetsu Kawashima in addition to three recordings under his own name. His music was featured on the HBO series “We Are Who We Are” in 2020.
Hanrahan has toured Europe and Japan extensively with his own band as well as with Deep Rumba and Conjure, most recently at the Punta Giara Jazz Festival in Sardinia, Italy (2012) and at the Blue Note Tokyo (2011). He has performed in NYC at Carnegie Hall, the Public Theater, SOB’s and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.