Dan Stern is an exploratory and socially engaged composer, saxophonist/clarinettist, improviser and performance artist. UK-based, he first came to attention in the London jazz scene with The Dan Stern Group featuring Robert Mitchell, Julian Siegel and Asaf Sirkis, Woodwork featuring Andrew McCorkmack and Garath Lockrane, and 4 Brothers and a Ghost with Mikel Andonegi and Laurie Lowe. Dan’s music blends the soulful polyphonic approach of Jan Garbarek, Pauline Oliveros’ deep listening, and Heiner Goebbels’ theatre of concepts. Currently, he is working on a project called “64”, a solo immersive project about memory and time, and Imprint with artist ed Berriman, an installation practice exploring sound, print and the marks they make.
Drawing on philosophers of time such as Heidegger, Adorno and Deleuze, Renaissance and Medieval polyphony, and the improvisational world of jazz musicians such as Jan Garbarek and Dave Liebman, Dan uses polyphony to create exploratory regimes of musical time and space. Current work asks how the past generates the new: how are possible futures denied; how does the past continually change in the present; and how is contemporary time a broken time?
Dan’s improvisational approach gathers these themes from the here-and-now temporality of the performance. He creates long forms that draw on a theatre of musical space and time. His live shows are a mixture of the intimate feel of Olafur Arnulds, the slowed down pace of a La Monte Young composition, and the sonic immersivity of a Janet Cardiff sound sculpture. Listeners are enveloped in sound as they sit in a circle, surrounded by speakers, with Dan in the centre as he offers a sonic journey through musical shapes and heard spaces that are transformed into dialogues with the future, past and present.
Criss-crossing across genres he has worked with jazz musicians Dave Liebman, Dave Binney, Tim Garland, Gwilym Simcock, and Andy Sheppard; classical forces with the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Sinfonietta; contemporary art practice at Tate Modern and Central Saint Martins; and in numerous dance and physical theatre contexts.