In this episode of Portrait of the Artist, Jonah Evans and Meredith Hobbs Coons talk to Christopher Rountree, conductor and artistic director of Wild Up. They talk about the June 19th release of Wild Up’s fifth volume of their GRAMMY-winning Julius Eastman compendium, Gay Guerilla. The three of them explore touch on the agency, notation, and radical interpretive freedom of Julius Eastman’s work, as well as his philosophy of power, and how performers navigate collective sound-making.

Wild Up: https://www.wildup.org/

Wild Up IG: https://www.instagram.com/wildup/

Christopher Rountree: https://www.wildup.org/people/christopher-rountree/

Wild Up Tiny Desk Performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhWkvi8OPkc

From Wild Up's website/about: “We’re Wild Up. We’re a band. An experiment in its second decade. We make shows, and records. We make projects and tell stories that live somewhere between new music and theater and performance art and pop. The press says things about us. Our leader has a beard. We embrace the kindness of friends and strangers. We have dogs and gardens and kids. We once made the Himalayas out of cardboard, and sang atop them to the stars. We take photos with talismanic art objects. We’re repped by David Lieberman Artists Representatives.”

Photo by: Michael Leviton

Jonah Evans: https://jonahinthesnow.com/

Merideth Hobbs Coons: https://www.meredithhobbscoons.com/

Intro/interlude Music: "XXO" from the album Teeth by Magana: https://maganarama.bandcamp.com/album/teeth