Cornelia Street Cafe Features Jason Rigby Quintet, 4/23

The Cornelia Street Cafe will be featuring the Jason Rigby Quintet today, April 23. The quintet is a powerhouse ensemble formed to explore group improvisation with the twists and turns of a two-horn front line mixed with the dynamic sound of the Fender Rhodes electric piano. The band was formed conceptually out of the influences of Miles' 70's electric bands, Ornette Coleman's explorations with Don Cherry and Dewey Redman, and Jack DeJohnette's mid-70's work - all culminating in a modern mixture of grooves, free melodies, psychedelic sounds, and angular horn lines.

This performance comes off the heels of the critically acclaimed 2009 Fresh Sound Records release The Sage, which featured this very band. The QUINTET will be performing newly penned Rigby originals, as well as some material from the record. 

In May 1977 three artists--Robin Hirsch, a writer and director; Charles McKenna, an actor; and Raphaela Pivetta, a visual artist--stumbled across a tiny storefront on Cornelia Street in the heart of Greenwich Village and thought it the perfect place to open a café. For two months they scraped and sanded, plumbed and plastered, and did the intricate dance one does with the authorities who live beyond the Village, and on the weekend of July 4, 1977, mirabile dictu, they opened the Cornelia Street Café.

It was from the beginning an artists' café. Within a month there were poetry readings and music performances; and then a tiny play written for the café; and fiction writers; and Eskimo poetry; and puppeteers; and a living portrait of James Joyce; and the Four Quartets and the entire Iliad; and mime shows on the street outside the café; and comedians; and fairy tales and storytellers and Punch and Judy shows.

Over the years it has presented an enormous variety of artists, from singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega to poet-senator Eugene McCarthy, from members of Monty Python to members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It has offered a performance home to the Songwriters Exchange, the Writers Room, the Writers Studio, the Greek-American Writers Association, the Italian-American Writers Association, the New Works Project/Theatre, and many others.

There is also a performance space downstairs where the tradition of theater, performance, music and poetry is alive and well. As Mayor Edward Koch said in a proclamation celebrating the café's 10^th anniversary in 1987, it has become "a culinary as well as a cultural landmark."