Free admission (reservations recommended)
Showtime: 8:30
*Dinner and drinks are available throughout the performance*
Hailing from the prairies of Iowa and currently based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Ross Clowser, is an American composer, improviser, scholar, and guitarist. Working in multiple genres, mediums, and formats, he combines a wide array of influences, approaches, and modalities to his compositions and collaborations. Influenced by the legacy of jazz, post-rock, improvised music, American experimentalism, electronic music, and his interest in musicology, his work reflects the past and looks toward the future, while being anchored in the present moment.
His work includes jazz composition, electronic music programming, through composed music, free improvisation, and visual art.
His current projects include The Ross Clowser Quartet,featuring Joe Strachan, Josh Granowski, and Tarek Abdelqader, Starflower, a collaboration with Toby Ramaswamy and Anna Dolde, People Electric, and audio visual collaboration with his sibling, artist Anna Clowser. He has played and collaborated with a number of artists including Erik Fratzke, Nathan Hanson, Steve Hirsh, Dylan Hester, Max Wanderman, Chris Hepola, Leyna Marika Papach, and more.
During this time Hecht was writing about Renaissance poetry, as professors do, which culminated in a book published by Oxford University Press in 2022 (What Rosalind Likes), and was also directing student performances of Shakespeare and other Renaissance drama in northwest Indiana. These productions also served as opportunities to make further artistic connections in Chicago, with Clearfield composing music, and other artists helping with choreography (both dance and violence!) and costumes and design. In retrospect, however, the musical connections were more important: Hecht was hearing how more and more music could be connected with emotions and scenes of the maximum interest and vitality: his passions were finding how they could entwine and merge in music. And teaching students how to make audiences pay attention turns out to also be a useful skill set for live musical performance.
A sabbatical to work on his book also afforded the opportunity to return to the piano with Clearfield as a new guide. Eventually Hecht began attending jam sessions hosted by some of his most admired members of the scene: Ulery, Quin Kirchner, and, critically, Greg Ward. On those stages he absorbed as a performer things that he had until then understood more theoretically: the commitment to honesty, openness; the work ethic to do justice, by long hours of practice, to the myriad traditions that flow into the music; the commitment to the humanity and potential of everyone who participates in the music, on stage and off, on any given night.
In 2020, his wife (also an English professor) got a new post at a college in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and the couple agreed that it was time for Hecht to make the big switch: he would leave his professorship and turn his full attention to performance and composition, aiming to make up for lost time.