Annual MATA Festival
In partnership with ISSUE Project Room

NIGHT ONE: ENTER THE IMPOSSIBLE

The 27th annual MATA Festival opens with Jessie Cox’s evening-length opus Enter the Impossible, written for and performed by the unparalleled Sun Ra Arkestra, with FLUX Quartet and Sam Yulsman.

Enter the Impossible is imagined as a space flight, journeying through different musical spaces, including many pieces from Sun Ra Arkestra’s large collection of works, such as Say from their recent record Swirling, or the classic Space is the Place, among others.

The concert also includes the world premiere of Cox’s Sound Drape Painting, inspired by Sam Gilliam’s drape paintings and exploring new ways of hearing musical form and movement through the sonic. Cox explains, “Music as aesthetic experience proposes, or is a site to imagine, ways of spacing – how we come to inhabit and make space and time."

FLUX Quartet will also perform the New York premiere of jazz saxophonist, flutist, composer, poet, and visual artist Oliver Lake’s One Move as well as the world premiere of MATA Festival 2025 Early-Career Composer Diallo Banks’ Sarmad for string quartet. Sarmad is structured around the concept of yati, a principle in South Indian music that shapes musical phrases through systematic variation.

Performing ARTISTS and ENSEMBLES

THE SUN RA ARKESTRA

Sun Ra founded the Sun Ra Arkestra in Chicago in the mid-1950's.

Sun Ra was among the earliest pioneers of the synthesizer and the free jazz revolution of 1960’s. Sun Ra sent a strong spiritual and musical message to his Arkestra wanting them to help make the universe better through positive vibrations and music.

The Sun Ra Arkestra are known worldwide for their live shows that combine big-band swing, space-age free jazz, be-bop, singing, dancing, chanting and Afro-pageantry. The Arkestra has been at the forefront of Afro-futurism since their inception.

The Arkestra have recorded more than 100 albums. Their 2020 album "Swirling" was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Big Band Jazz Ensemble recording. Their newest album “Lights On A Satellite” was released in February 2025.

After more than 60 years the band continue to circle the globe on their Inter-Galactic tour. Recent highlights include shows at the Kennedy Center with Solange, The Berlin Opera House, the Burlington Jazz Festival and a New York City show at Radio City Music Hall.

In 2025 they will be performing at the Big Ears Festival in Tennessee, a West Coast Tour, NY City Winter Jazz Fest and touring Australia and Europe as well as the DC Jazz Festival.

Few bands have travelled this far – cosmically and musically.

“The possible has been tried and failed. Now it’s time to try the impossible.”

Sun Ra

Space is the Place!

FLUX Quartet

The FLUX Quartet is a New York-based string ensemble founded in the late 1990s by violinist Tom Chiu, inspired by the experimental ethos of the Fluxus art movement. Renowned for their fearless approach to contemporary classical music, the quartet has premiered over 100 works by leading avant-garde composers such as Alvin Lucier, Wadada Leo Smith, Oliver Lake, and Julio Estrada. They are particularly acclaimed for their definitive performances and recordings of Morton Feldman’s string quartets, including the monumental six-hour String Quartet No. 2 .

FLUX has performed at prestigious venues like Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, the Kennedy Center, and international festivals across Europe, Australia, and the Americas. Their collaborations span diverse disciplines, including projects with choreographers Pam Tanowitz and Shen Wei, experimental balloonist Judy Dunaway, and digital art ensemble OpenEnded Group. They also appeared in Matthew Barney’s film River of Fundament .

Committed to nurturing emerging talent, FLUX has held residencies at institutions such as Wesleyan, Princeton, and Dartmouth, and has received support from organizations like the American Composers Forum and the Aaron Copland Fund .

Their discography includes releases on labels like Mode Records, Cantaloupe, Tzadik, and Cold Blue Music, solidifying their status as a leading force in contemporary string quartet performance.

MATA MAVEN

Sam Yulsman

Sam Yulsman is a pianist, composer and theorist with roots in a wide array of experimental music and jazz lineages. He has collaborated closely with Jessie Cox, Roman Filiu, Brandon Lopez, Chris Corsano, Anaïs Maviel, Art Lande, Lester St. Louis, Alicia Hall Moran, Anna Webber, Diego Espinosa, TJ Borden, Marcela Lucatelli and Kevin Ramsay among many others. As a composer his work has been performed by ensembles and soloists including JACK Quartet, Talea Ensemble, String Noise, Distractfold, Ensemble Korea, Rage Thormbones and Séverine Ballon. He completed his DMA in composition at Columbia University in 2021 where he studied with George E. Lewis.

Featured COMPOSERS

Jessie Cox

Jessie Cox is Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University and active as a composer, drummer, and scholar. From Switzerland, with roots in Trinidad and Tobago, Cox thinks through questions of race, migration, national belonging, and our relation to the planet and the cosmos. His first monograph, Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices (Duke UP, 2025), addresses how thinking with blackness and experimental musical practices might afford the opening of new discourses, such as thematizing Black Swiss Life.

Cox makes music about the universe and our future in it. Through avant-garde classical, experimental jazz, and sound art, he has devised his own strand of musical science fiction, one that asks where we go next. He is influenced by a vast array of artists who have used their music to imagine futures, and takes Afrofuturism as a core inspiration, asking questions about existence, and the ways we make spaces habitable. Known for its disquieting tone and unexpected structural changes, his music steps into the unknown, and has been referred to by the New Yorker (Alex Ross) as an example of “dynamic pointillism,” a nebulous and ever-expanding sound world that includes “breathy instrumental noises, mournfully wailing glissandi, and climactic stampedes of frantic figuration.”

A dedicated collaborator, Cox has worked as a composer and drummer with ensembles such as the Sun Ra Arkestra, LA Phil, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, and the International Contemporary Ensemble; at Festivals such as the Lucerne Festival, MaerzMusik, and Opera Omaha. 

Program Note Enter the Impossible
https://www.jessiecoxmusic.com/enter-the-impossible 

“Enter the Impossible” is an evening length work intended as a celebration of the Sun Ra Arkestra and their legacy. Commissioned by the Paul Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the work was completed and premiered in 2023. Imagined as a space flight, the work is a journey through different musical spaces, visualized during the performance by way of a projected virtual reality, or game-like, world as a score, which is traversed during the performance. Throughout this journey we also hear pieces from the Sun Ra Arkestra’s large collection of works, such as “Say,” which can be found on their recent record Swirling, or the classic “Space is the Place,” amongst many others. The Sun Ra Arkestra signifies and taught me a way of thinking, living, and practicing music, that provides a possibility for better worlds not yet known. The piece follows this journey of searching and finding the Arkestra as also this possibility of what Sun Ra might have called the “Alter Destiny”—another way to make life and to co-inhabit this cosmos. Unimaginable worlds, new symbiotic relations with the environment, other ways of hearing each other, these kinds of transformations are made possible with music in the Arkestra’s sonic pace flight. For this performance at Issue Project Room, as part of the MATA Festival, the Sun Ra Arkestra and myself will be joined by Flux Quartet and Sam Yulsman. May we find inaudible worlds through musical imagination for a better world.

Program Note Sound Drape Paintings 1

Inspired by Sam Gilliam’s drape paintings, this work for string quartet explores new ways of hearing musical form and movement through the sonic. Music as aesthetic experience proposes, or is a site to imagine, ways of spacing—how we come to inhabit and make space and time. When Sam Gilliam hangs his canvas instead of affixing it as a square on the wall, it invites us to change how we engage in perceiving space and our experience of the work over time. We might have to move our head, or eyes, bodies, or mind, differently and in underexplored ways. This is not simply about how we see an artwork but also about how the world is disclosed to us, and how we see our self in relation (to the world, others, and experiences). In this musical work, I specifically engage this question through the performers’ bodies in relation to their instrument and harmonic space. The latter means here not only the way in which sounds are put together to create movement in musical form but rather also how harmony implies tuning, size of pitches, and timbre. Through a shift in these musical parameters, audible experiences, I aim to open new spacings of existence, of world, for other possible futures.

Oliver Lake

The artistic scope of renowned saxophonist, composer,painter, and poet Oliver Lake’s half-century-long careeris unparalleled. An extensive resume of hiscollaborations includes work with the BrooklynPhilharmonic, Flux String Quartet, Bjork, Lou Reed, ATribe Called Quest, Mos Def, Me’shell Ndegeocello,Anthony Braxton, James Blood Ulmer, William Parker,Vijay Iyer, Reggie Workman, Andrew Cyrille and averitable who’s who of the jazz vanguard. Oliver’sefforts extend far beyond the music, with his creation ofthe non-profit Passin’ Thru organization, becoming amainstay at Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum, publishing twobooks of poetry and frequently producing visual artworkfor exhibitions across the country.

Lake’s breadth of disciplines can be traced back to hisformative years with the Black Artists Group, theinnovative St. Louis collective of musicians, poets,dancers and painters he helped architect over 35 yearsago. As a co-founder of the internationally acclaimedWorld Saxophone Quartet (with fellow luminaries DavidMurray, Julius Hemphill and Hamiet Bluiett), Oliverfirmly established himself in the “Loft” jazz scene of the1970’s in New York City, and has since produced abody of work that is both expansive and versatileenough to avoid falling solely into the trappings of the“avant-garde” and “free” labels. The fact that his workcan stand on compositional merit alone, all while hehas etched a place for himself as one of the elitesaxophone players and improvisers of recent times, isa testament to Oliver Lake’s stature as an artist.

Lake’s output as an exacting and unequivocally originalcomposer has long been celebrated, highlighted bycommissions awarded from the Library of Congress,the Rockefeller Foundation ASCAP, the InternationalAssociation for Jazz Education, Composers Forum andthe McKim Foundation. He has been the recipient ofthe Guggenheim Fellowship and was also presentedwith the Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award at theKennedy Center in 2006.

In 2014, Oliver was honored with what is arguably thegreatest recognition of his artistry and vision to date,becoming one of only nineteen grantees appointed forthe prestigious Doris Duke Artist Award, a multi-yeargrant awarded to American artists in the fields of jazz,theater and dance. 2022 received lifetime achievementaward from Arts For Arts Visions Festival. A trailblazerthrough and through, Oliver Lake continues tocompose, write poetry and paint

Program Note “One Move“

“One Move” the title refers to the piece being one movement. The composition begins with a medium tempo rhythmic motif, from that point the composition begins exploring and expanding those beginning ideas. The piece continues by pairing the two violins playing a melody, and the viola and cello playing a counter melody. There is interplay by the quartet and the piece concludes with the first violin playing the beginning melody, with accompaniment from the rest of the quartet.

Early-Career COMPOSERS

Diallo Banks

Diallo Banks is a composer interested in sympathetic resonance, open scores, improvisation, and instrument modification. As a performer, his work pushes the Hammond organ’s capabilities to their limits while still firmly engaging with its history as a sonic signifier of Black identity. Diallo’s works have been commissioned and performed by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Yale Philharmonia, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Aspen Conducting Orchestra, and Contemporary Insights Ensemble in Leipzig, Germany. He has received awards and recognition from the American Composers Orchestra, Albany Symphony, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and MATA Festival. His works have been performed at venues such as the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Meyerson Symphony Hall, ISSUE Project Room, and the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello in Venice. He holds degrees from the Conservatory of Music at Lynn University and a Master of Music in Composition from Yale University. In the fall of 2025, he will begin his Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition at Columbia University. Outside of music, Diallo enjoys reading, vegan cooking, painting, and watching films.

Program Notes for Sarmad 2025:

"The title of this piece comes from the Persian word sarmad meaning "eternal" or "everlasting". In this work I was interested in presenting delicately curated harmonies that materialize piece by piece, exploring their instability, then have them melt away underneath a subtle interplay of overtones."

Program Note for the work:

This piece, ⇆, written for any number of string instruments and improvisers, takes its title from the fact that some performers read the score left to right, while others read it right to left signified by these two arrows atop the score. The work is formally structured around the concept of yati, a fundamental principle in South Indian music that shapes musical phrases through systematic variation. Among its many forms, I am particularly drawn to gopuccha yati, in which a phrase is gradually shortened, creating tension that not until the end, satisfyingly resolves within the rhythmic grid. There's something inspiring for me about transformation through loss: What can be gained in that omission? How does it affect the flow of time? There's a moment we shift our relationship to something familiar, now with fewer details and less definition, what does that say about how we listen?