20th anniversary concert

Twenty musicians

In February 2008 the BL!NDMAN saxophone quartet will have existed for twenty years. This will be celebrated with a concert involving three artists: Anouk De Clercq and Kris Verdonck.

The last two will create a stage setting for an overview of two decades of musical and theatrical wanderings, and we can best describe it as a memory landscape. The second setting is a musical one: Eric Sleichim, the group’s figurehead, is composing a new work in which an anthology of musical steps taken in the past (works by Tenney, Reich, Cage, Bryars, Santiago, Wright, Crumb, Purcell, Frescobaldi, Ives, Riley, Lachenmann, Nas, Stravinsky, De Mey, Glass, Sleichim) will be given a place and be related to the present.

Over these twenty years, BL!NDMAN has developed not only musically and theatrically but also in terms of its personnel. Apart from the ‘mother quartet’, consisting of the saxophonists Eric Sleichim, Koen Maas, Piet Rebel and Raf Minten, four junior quartets (voice, drums, strings and sax) now operate under BL!NDMAN’s wing: for these twentieth anniversary festivities no less than twenty musicians will appear on stage.