Master Classes with Guitarist and Composer Mike Baggetta

Guitarist and composer Mike Baggetta will lead a Harmony and Improvisation Master Class at 9:30 a.m. and a Guitar Workshop at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 15, in Lipinsky Hall room 018. Both are free and open to everyone.

To hear a sample of Baggetta’s acclaimed music, visit his website.

***********************************************

UNC Asheville’s Department of Music, which is hosting Baggetta’s visit to campus, provides this description of his work:

NY Guitar poet Mike Baggetta’s new recording with his potent trio veers daringly and compellingly from patient, elegiac freedom to searing, oozing sludge rock without the slightest hesitation or apology. One cannot resist its myriad charms. Cool!” -Nels Cline, Guitarist

“Mike Baggetta makes stealthy, mysterious music … he’s trying to do something personal with collective improvisation without ever getting in the way of beauty.” -Ben Ratliff, New York Times

“…a kind of post-Frisellian sonic explorer … with his wild whammy-bar articulations, ambient looping and rippling arpeggios … full of subversive surprises, hellacious skronking, string-scraping and a general hornets’ nest of fuzz-toned dissonance” -Bill Milkowski, DownBeat Magazine / Slate Magazine
_____

It has been said that Mike Baggetta is “a guitarist of slippery proficiency” (New York Times), that his performances are “totally compelling” (Jazz Journal, UK) and that “his melodic sense is truly beautiful.” (JazzReview.com)

Mike’s singular and very personal musical style seeks to blur the lines between composition and improvisation, while connecting a wide range of musical genres that influence him. He has earned accolades from the press that call this approach “…beguilingly atmospheric…” (Time Out New York) and that “Baggetta’s music is quietly transgressive… Even when he plays a lot of notes, his playing can sound almost static, as though ideas were being snagged out of thin air.” (Hartford Courant)

His last 4 albums as a leader have been released on the Fresh Sound New Talent label, including Spectre, chosen as best of 2016 by Guitar Moderne and New York City Jazz Record, among others, and have featured working bands including Jerome Harris, Billy Mintz, Jason Rigby, Eivind Opsvik, George Schuller and RJ Miller. Mike also co-leads the new music duo TIN/BAG with trumpeter Kris Tiner. They have released 4 albums together including Bridges, which was included in Time Out New York’s Top 10 Jazz Albums of 2011. Baggetta’s next album, Wall of Flowers, out March 15, 2019 on Big Ego Records, features a reimagining of his trio music alongside drummer Jim Keltner and bassist Mike Watt.

Baggetta has had the pleasure to work all over the world with a wide range of visionary musicians across many generations including David Torn, Mike Watt, Jim Keltner, Nels Cline, Donny McCaslin, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Tim Berne, Craig Taborn, Dominique Eade, Ches Smith, Tyshawn Sorey, Psychic Temple, Julian Lage, Jon Irabagon, Greg Tardy, Jerome Harris, Cameron Brown, David Wax Museum, Tom Harrell, Joseph C. Philips’ Numinous, Imani Uzuri, Conrad Herwig, Billy Mintz, Eivind Opsvik, Jeremy Udden, and Ruth Brown among many others.