CoCoCo with Tenzin Choegyal
Wednesday 30 April, 7.00pm – Ian Hanger Recital Hall
Over the past week, a group of first year students and staff members worked with Tenzin Choegyal, arranging and improvising songs for this performance. Tenzin brought inspiration (songs, images, poems), and spun his magic with the group to shape these inspirations into semi-improvised pieces. We perform a suite of tunes from those sessions, which will be announced from the stage. The students are part of the new first year Music Making course at the Conservatorium.
CoCoCo:
Indigo Canavan cello
Suraj Eswaran piano
Marcelle Gunning percussion
Sophie Leipold-Tedds voice & guitar
Brayden Macandrews percussion
Jadyn Morgan percussion
Logan Nutley oboe
Elliott Sternberg bass trombone
with staff members:
Erik Griswold piano
Graeme Jennings violin
Tim Munro flute
Vanessa Tomlinson percussion
Tenzin Choegyal appears thanks to the generosity of the Philip Bacon Visiting Artist fund …/
Tenzin Choegyal is one of the world’s finest musicians in the Tibetan tradition. As a son of Tibetan nomads, he feels a particular connection to the music of the high Himalayan plateau.
In a career spanning 20+ years Tenzin has performed at festivals across Australia and curated numerous events and concerts including Brisbane’s annual Festival of Tibet. Internationally he has performed in New Zealand, Japan, India, Germany, Bangladesh, Russia and USA, including performances at New York’s Carnegie Hall. He has also opened many of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s Public Talks in Australia, New Zealand and Japan with his musical offerings.
While proudly continuing the unbroken nomadic lineage which is central to his repertoire, Tenzin also embraces opportunities to take his music into more contemporary, uncharted territory, both in the studio and on stage.
Tenzin has nine independent albums, three of them with his fusion band Tibet2Timbuk2, and regularly performs with Camerata Brisbane’s acclaimed Chamber Orchestra. His collaborative albums include The Last Dalai Lama? with Philip Glass, Peradam by Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith featuring Anoushka Shankar & Charlotte Gainsbourg, and the 2021 Grammy-nominated Songs from the Bardo released through Smithsonian Folkways with his longtime friend and collaborator Jesse Paris Smith and Laurie Anderson – a moving interpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
An outstanding composer/ performer with a great depth of musical knowledge, intuition and inventiveness, Tenzin continues to bring new sounds of Tibet while strongly holding the essence of ancient Tibetan wisdom. He attributes his art form to the early karmic imprints of hearing his mother and father as a toddler.