Bang on a Can All-Stars

The Bang on a Can All-Stars function as the touring and recording arm of the parent Bang on a Can organization. Originally conceived more as a festival than as a fixed performing group, Bang on a Can arose during the 1990s with the aim of connecting avant-garde composition to broader popular audiences, and the All-Stars themselves have amassed an unusually extensive discography.

Three composers—Julia Wolfe, David Lang, and Michael Gordon—launched Bang on a Can in 1987 as an annual music festival. They looked to Louis Andriessen as a guiding spirit, regularly programming his compositions alongside other experimental works. What began as a single-day event soon expanded into multiple live productions and recording projects of assorted formats. The first commercial documentation appeared in 1992 when CRI released Bang on a Can Live, Vol. 1. That same year the Bang on a Can All-Stars were assembled as a six-piece amplified ensemble whose repertoire deliberately blurred distinctions among classical, jazz, rock, global, and experimental traditions. Early on the boundary separating the festival from the All-Stars remained fluid; the 1995 album Industry, for example, presented music by the three founders and Andriessen performed by an ad-hoc lineup.

Current All-Stars members are Robert Black, Mark Stewart, David Cossin, Vicky Chow, Ken Thomson, and Arlen Hlusko, while earlier participants included composer Evan Ziporyn and cellist Maya Beiser. Both onstage and in the studio the group has cultivated an extensive network of collaborators. These have encompassed composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Tan Dun, jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, Burmese circle-drum master Kyaw Kyaw Naing, and hip-hop artist DJ Spooky. Notable live projects have featured a dance collaboration with Sasha Waltz that took Terry Riley’s In C as its foundation and a presentation of Wolfe’s Flower Power scored for the All-Stars together with orchestra. The ensemble attracted widespread notice with its 2015 recording of Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields and again in 2020 with Meredith Monk’s Memory Game. All releases appear on the organization’s own Cantaloupe imprint. In 2022 the All-Stars reunited with Riley to document his Autodreamographical Tales.