Artist description vibraphone and piano duo

Music Style experimental music duo

Musical Influences John Cage, John Cale, Frank Zappa

Similar Artists John Cage, John Cale, Frank Zappa

Artist History Jack the Dog is a duo of experimental music founded in 1994 in Chicago by Carrie Biolo (percussion/composer) and Jeff Kowalkowski (piano composer). They perform their own collaboratively composed music.Jack the Dog performs at least twice a month in a variety of venues including concert halls, festivals, galleries, and clubs. They have toured Germany twice, in 1996 and 1998. Last February they composed a work for composer Pauline Oliveros, which they performed in the New Millenium/New Music series at the Chicago Cultural Center. In 1998 they wrote Missa Canibus (Mass of the Dogs) which was performed at Links Hall in Chicago, and at the International Performance Art Festival in Cleveland and is now being released on comapct disc by Uvulittle Records.Jack the Dog has also worked with artists from other disciplines, like Curious Theater Branch, and the Australian suspension artist Stelarc.Jack was an actual dog who died in 1997.

Group Members Carrie Biolo (1969, Marguette, Michigan) has premiered numerous works for percussion and presented many solo and chamber recitals internationally. She performs and records with reed master/composer Guillermo Gregorio, and she recorded the music of Cornelius Cardew and Anthony Braxton under the direction of Art Lange for HatArt in 1998. In January 1997 she presented four performances of a collaboration with performance artist Paula Killen at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her compositions have also been heard on "This American Life" on National Public Radio.She toured with Eugene Chadbourne in the "Insects and Western Party" in 1997. She holds an M.M. from DePaul University during which time she was the Graduate Assistant of Percussion and was the winner of the concerto competition. She also studied marimba at the Landesmusikakademie in Nienbourg, Germany.Ms. Biolo is an extremely successful dog trainer. Her dog Corky often performs and records with Jack the Dog.Jeff Kowalkowski (1967, Chicago) teaches composition at DePaul University and works on recording projects in some of the poorer neighborhoods in Chicago with funding from the Illinois Arts Council.Since 1995 Kowalkowski has worked on an opera: "Bosch tapped the gas pedal and the caprice moved forward....." with the Amsterdam based composer Marko Ciciliani. First performed in Hamburg in 1996, the work has now been produced 21 times in the U.S., Germany, and Holland. In 1998 a tour was supported by the Gaudeamus Foundation of the Netherlands.He was invited to Darmstadt in 1998 to participate in Gerhard Staebler's international multi-media collaboration "Voix[time]." He was commissioned fromt the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago for a sound installation in 1997, and a CD version of the same piece in 1998. He has received grants from the American Composer's Forum, the Kulturebehoerde of Hamburg, and "Meet the Composer." He was awarded a doctorate in composition from Northwestern University in 1996.

Instruments vibraphone, piano

Albums ah it's like you're talking in your head and you just can't, Scan 12, Missa Canibus

Press Reviews The practice of making new music based on traditional religious forms has a considerable legacy--take Arvo Part's Litany, Cantus, and Psalom, or the coval pieces for Greek Orthodox communion that John Taverner wrote in the 70s. From a less reverent region of the experimental tradittion, Chicago's own Jack The Dog set out in December 1996 to compose a complete Roman Catholic mass. True to its name, the group settled on a canine theme for its religious excursion; the resulting Missa Canibus subverts dogma with dog, emphasizing biblical passages about shaggy beasts. On the responsorial psalm, for instance, words from Psalms 22:17-22--about our fang-toothed friends--are used in the formation of mesostics, a puzzlelike device John Cale frequently used to construct his poetry. The result is a radical condensation of the text--nonsensical, but still somehow relevant. Mixing Cagean conceptualism with religious ceremony is a task for specialists only, and with Carrie Biolo, whose main ax is vibraphone, and Jeffrey Kowalkowski, who primarily mans electric keyboard, Jack the Dog has certainly developed a unique mo since its inception in 1994. The twosome composes collaboratively, often using ironic performance-art tactics, sometimes incorporating taped audio-verite soundscapes, additional tracks of music, or brash sounding collages, and performing brisk unison parts consisting of tricky rhythms and coiling lines that hark back as much to Frank Zappa "serious" music as to the heyday of mimalism. Missa Canibus will be presented twice as part of the Sovereign's Festival, a six-weekend exploration of "some of the ways that sovereignty amongst people and within an individual creates pressures that shape behavior," curated by singer, actor, and playwright Jenny Magnus.-John Corbett

Location Chicago, IL - USA

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