OUT COLD/ZIPPO SONGS Set for BAM's 30th Next Wave Festival, 10/27

From Thursday, October 25 through Saturday, October 27 at 7:30 PM, OUT COLD/ZIPPO SONGS-a double-bill of dramatic song cycles with music and lyrics by Phil Kline (Unsilent Night,John the Revelator)-will be presented as part of BAM (Brooklyn Academy Of Music)'s 30th Next Wave Festival, in a co-production with American Opera Projects (AOP).

Both cycles will be performed by "transcendent" (Village Voice) vocalist Theo Bleckmann and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble(ACME), with stage direction by Emma Griffin and lighting design by Mark Barton. ACME players for Out Cold / Zippo Songs are Michi Wiancko, Ben Russell, and Caleb Burhans, violins; Nadia Sirota, viola; Clarice Jensen, cello; Logan Coale, bass; Alex Sopp, flute; Michelle Farah, oboe; Timothy Andres, piano; and Chris Thompson, percussion.

These will be among the first performances in BAM's spectacular new Richard B. Fisher Building (321 Ashland Place), a state-of-the-art black box theater recently profiled by the New York Times.

The first half of the evening features the premiere of a new chamber ensemble version of Kline's much-lauded Zippo Songs, written in 2003 for Theo Bleckmann and recorded on Cantaloupe Music. Zippo Songsoriginated when Kline discovered the practice of scratching poems onto the sides of Zippo lighters by American GIs in Vietnam. These inscriptions contain a world of emotion that speak purely and without political commentary. The songs follow like a harrowing series of haikus, expressing the gamut of emotions young men feel in the throes of war. "One of the most brutally frank cong cycles ever penned," wrote Alex Ross in The New Yorker. Zippo Songs was originally written for small amplified rock ensemble, but will now be heard in its entirety for the first time in an arrangement for string quintet, piano and percussion. The new scoring, called "luminous" by The New York Times, reveals subtle shades of color without losing any of the original's punch.

The second half features the world premiere of Out Cold, an all-new song cycle written for Kline's muse Theo Bleckmann and ACME, and co-commissioned by American Opera Projects. Kline began to think of the project during a NY blizzard in January 2010. He started with the idea of the great romantic song cycle Winterreise (winter journey)-Schubert's long walk out into the cold-and fused it with the ethos of Frank Sinatra's "suicide song" LP's with Nelson Riddle from the 1950's (particularly Only the Lonely). The winter landscape is replaced by a mythical bar at 2:45am, with a man haunted by the past and searching for something, singing sad and beautiful songs with a ten-piece band from a dark corner of heaven. Despite the cozy environs, the singer is "out cold" in the sense of being an outcast, and in the sense of being unconscious, even in his waking moments.

These three October performances mark the first presenting partnership between AOP and BAM, both located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

An artist panel discussion will follow the Friday, October 26 performance. Tickets are $20 and available at www.bam.org