The UVA Department of Music presents Joel Harrison and Anthony Pirog Quartet, celebrating the release of The Great Mirage (AGS Recordings), on Monday, April 17th 2023 at 8pm in Old Cabell Hall. This free concert is made possible by a generous donation by the Gassmann Fund for Innovation in Music.

The performance features guitarists Joel Harrision, Anthony Pirog, bassist Matt Pavolka and Mike Kuhl on drums.

Guitarists Anthony Pirog and Joel Harrison tend to finish each others' sentences when they play. Twenty five years separate them in age, and yet they seem to have common ancestry. Both are from Wash. D.C., both love jazz, rock, fusion, avant garde, folk, funk, and country music, and both often do all of it all at once. A previous encounter took place in the now defunct 3 guitar group The Spellcasters (Cuneiform Records/ 2018.) Now the two plectrists have conjured a true collaboration.

On The Great Mirage each composed and arranged music for the session, the music caterwauls between heavy and light, really loud and really soft, gorgeous, spiky, grooving and free. The record is a bit of a 21st century essay in what the guitar can do. The band’s sense of joy and adventure is palpable as they extend their range and reach deep into American guitar history and future.

Joel Harrison
Guitarist, composer, arranger, lyricist, writer, educator, and vocalist Joel Harrison has “created a new blueprint for jazz” (New Orleans Times-Picayune). A Guggenheim Fellow (2010) whose compositions have been commissioned by Chamber Music America, Meet the Composer, New Music USA, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, and the Mary Flagler Cary Trust., he has released 23 CDs as a leader on seven different labels. Harrison’s music may be founded on jazz but veers into classical, rock, country, and all manner of American roots music. Succinctly described by the New York Times as “protean… brilliant,” he is also an active film composer, having worked on the Oscar-nominated Traffic Stop and the Sundance awardee Southern Comfort. Harrison is the founder and director of the Alternative Guitar Summit, a yearly festival devoted to new and unusual guitar music. Pat Metheny has called the Summit “ one of the most interesting adistinguished forums for guitar on the planet.

Harrison is the author of “Guitar Talk: conversations with visionary players” as well as “Modern Jazz Standards for Guitar.”

Anthony Pirog
Washington, D.C.'s jazz and experimental music scenes wouldn't be quite where they are today without Anthony Pirog. The guitarist, composer and loops magician is a quiet but ubiquitous force on stages around his hometown. With fearsome chops and a keen ear for odd beauty, Pirog has helped expand the possibilities of jazz, rock and experimentalism in a town long known for its straight-ahead tradition.

Anthony's roots as a guitarist are in the work of D.C. guitar heroes Danny Gatton and Roy Buchanan, and their virtuosic technique that blended all styles of popular music.

He has taken and built upon those roots, working in straight and experimental jazz, improvisation and electronics/looping, and he somehow takes these styles, all of which he has mastered and makes them all work together and also makes them all his own.

Old Cabell Hall is located on the south end of UVA’s historic lawn, directly opposite the Rotunda. (map) Parking is available in the central grounds parking garage on Emmet Street, in the C1 parking lot off McCormick Rd, and in the parking lots at the UVA Corner. Handicap parking is available in the small parking lot adjacent to Bryan Hall.

All programs are subject to change. For more information please call the Department of Music at 434.924.3052 or write music@virginia.edu

The University of Virginia Department of Music thanks Michael Gassmann and Cynthia Lewis for creating the Gassmann Fund which invites innovative artists who perform or incorporate into their music experimental rock, free improvisation, world, and computer music; arrange residencies to create opportunities for faculty and students to work closely with innovative artists; support innovative and experimental programs and projects for faculty and students who are pushing musical boundaries; and organize trips for UVA students to collaborate with musicians and present original work outside of Charlottesville.

For the most updated event information, please visit https://music.virginia.edu/anthony-pirog-and-joel-harrison-cd-release-concert