Grammy Award-winning guitarist and composer Bill Frisell and Obie-winning experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison recently premiered “The Great Flood,” – an electrifying, soulful, and thought provoking 75-minute multimedia work of original music and film inspired by the 1927 Mississippi River floods. Now, Frisell and Morrison take The Great Flood on the road, stopping at select University and public venues across the country. The complete list of dates is listed below.
The Great Flood premiered last month at ELLNORA | The Guitar Festival at the University of Illinois’ Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, and received a standing ovation for its stirring, contemporary perspective on this natural disaster and the ensuing transformation of American society and music. In the spring of 1927, the Mississippi River broke out of its banks in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles to a depth of up to 30 feet. Part of its enduring legacy was the mass exodus of displaced sharecroppers. Musically, the Great Migration of rural southern blacks to Northern cities saw the Delta Blues electrified and reinterpreted as the Chicago blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll.
Members of the Illinois Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media Institute (eDream) and the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) collaborated with Morrison on the film, creating data-driven visualizations of the Mississippi River Valley showing the extent of the destructive floodwaters. “This was a novel collaboration between an inspired artist and data-visualization experts,” said Donna Cox, director of eDream and AVL.
The Great Flood is currently confirmed to stop in the following places:
2011
Thursday, November 3 – Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Friday, November 4 – Zankel Hall, New York, NY
Saturday, November 5 – Duke University, Durham, NC
2012
Saturday, March 31 – Wexner Center, Columbus, OH
Thursday, April 19 – UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA
Saturday, April 21 – SF Jazz, San Francisco, CA
Additional dates to be announced.
