CRISTINA PATO

Gaita

Critical acclaim

“The late cellist Jacqueline Du Pré and the legendary percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, and now the virtuoso Galician bagpiper (gaita player) Cristina Pato… Very few musicians of any gender have more visceral energy and vivacity than these three musicians.(…) This music on ‘Latina’ gets to you if you open your heart. In fact it will pry open the gateway to your soul and if you resist, it will get you anyway.” The World Music Report (2015) “A compact 36 minutes, “Latina” will leave you breathless. There’s nary a ballad – I can’t imagine wanting to leave the dance floor when this music is playing. Cristina Pato not only can play impressively but also uses her music to teach about the wide range of Latin music” Step Tempest (2015) “Even in an age when the mainstream is full of all kinds of esoterica, Cristina Pato has a particularly individualistic choice of axe: the Galician bagpipe. Her sound is wild, feral yet virtuosic and breathtakingly fast.” Lucid Culture (2015) "The late cellist Jacqueline Du Pré and the legendary percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, and now the virtuoso Galician bagpiper (gaita player) Cristina Pato… Very few musicians of any gender have more visceral energy and vivacity than these three musicians. Ms. Pato has something none of the other two musicians have: duende, that wicked magic that lurks deep down in the soul and is awoken when the artist reaches the kind of intensity of expression that is as explosive as a coiled spring held down for too long." World Music Report, Raul da Gama (May 13, 2015) "The bagpiper is warmly spontaneous, unleashing ardent melodies as if from a medieval weapon. There is a forward drive at every turn; deliberate gestures inform the extraordinary brightness that lights up the forte passages, and she brings a huge range of colours overall. An obsessive perfectionist, Cristina Pato has polished these individual sections of the Suite into gleaming gems." World Music Report, Raul da Gama (May 13, 2015) "This is truly a miraculous piece of music by a musician whose star—duende or not—is certainly on the rise." World Music Report, Raul da Gama (May 13, 2015) "...the instrument on which she slays is the gaita, a bagpipe of traditional use in Galicia... She is a virtuoso, and when she opens the floodgates of her technique... the force can knock you back a few steps. She knows to use it sparingly...She also knows...that authenticity and adaptability can be compatible under the right conditions. “Migrations,” with its suggestion of an itinerant and even mongrelized cultural legacy, sets the stage nicely for her: its an album suffused with awareness of tradition but breezy about its debts" The New York Times, Nate Chinen (January 2013)

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"Many of the musicians in the Silk Road Ensemble are headliners in their own right....and the amazing Cristina Pato, a classically trained pianist who doubles on the gaita, which she handles like a rock star...Pato was mezmerizing." Culture Cleveland 2012 “(…)But the beauty of the project is that it has from the start attracted international performers whose musical virtuosity and personal charisma rival those of Mr. Ma, who often takes a back seat (…)Cristina Pato, a flamboyant Galician bagpiper, energized raucous music from Osvaldo Golijov’s “Air to Air” (2006), which was largely inspired by her first encounter with the project, in a workshop”

New York Times, James R. Oestreich (June 10, 2009) “Cristina Pato fue un descubrimiento: como pianista de cámara conserva la misma fuerza escénica –basada en el magnetismo y no en el histrionismo- que le conocíamos en su otra actividad (…) con un look que evoca a Martha Argerich, tan sensual como ella, pero más racional y menos volcánica, como corresponde a una pianista del siglo XXI. Acostumbrada a hacer música con otros y a disfrutar de ello, Cristina Pato posee una sólida técnica(…) y además ama y entiende perfectamente la música de nuestros días”

Mundo Clasico, Xoan M. Carreira (19 de Julio, 2007) “ (…) the most unusual solo performance of the evening was by Cristina Pato, a Spanish bagpiper, who played a wailing, trilling, fluidly microtonal line in “Alala” (…) Ms. Pato’s sound is unlike any bagpipe playing you’ve heard: imagine the timbres of an oboe, a metal-ready electric guitar and a screaming trumpet rolled into a single, virtuosic burst of energy”

New York Times, Allan Kozinn (August 21,2007) “The Silk Road was conveniently extended to Galicia to include the sultry Galician bagpiper Cristina Pato (…)The silky, sensuous sound of her gaita (…) was just one exotic voice in Mr. Golijov’s “Air to Air”.

New York Times, Vivien Schweitzer (September 19,2006) “Ms. Pato will amaze you. Her playing dismisses any notion of a square, martial quality, infusing almost constant exotic coloration, finding entire ranges of microtones between pitches and bending one into another (…) what Mr. Golijov calls “something incredibly primal.”

New York Times, James R. Oestreich (September 16,2006) “Cristina Pato the Galician Bagpipe diva is renowned for her dramatic performances, but what counts is her skill and familiarity with that octopus of an instrument, the gaita”

BBC, Jean Bechhofer (January, 2004) “(…) Los minutos iniciales de la joven orensana entrañaron más riesgo y contenían más música que algunos conciertos de otros gaiteros. Cristina Pato se planta en escena con una actitud poco frecuente en tiempos de imágenes prefabricadas.(…) Lo mejor de Cristina Pato quizá no sea tanto este presente que la ilusiona, sino el futuro que se le adivina ...”

El País, Carlos Galilea (23 de Marzo de 1999)

CRISTINA PATO Jazziz Magazine • August 13, 2015

Piping Hot BY MARK HOLSTON “Everyone has a different image in mind when you say ‘I play the bagpipes,’ says Cristina Pato, the Spanish musician who has been mastering the instrument since the age of 4. “For some, it’s when ‘Amazing Grace’ is played at a funeral and everyone is crying. But my tradition is quite the opposite.” On Latina (Sunnyside), Pato and her quartet tackle a stimulating repertoire based on folkloric rhythms from the Americas and Spain. The centerpiece, “Latina 6/8 Suite,” features six movements that explore indigenous music genres that include Peru’s landó and Spain’s muiñeira. “The Afro-Colombian currulao, which I play on piano, was very challenging,” Pato says. “And, as a bagpiper, the fandango is hard to deliver in an eloquent way.” A native of the northwest Spanish province of Galicia, where bagpipes have been a core part of the regional music culture for centuries, Pato also studied piano. “For my mother, having an actual degree in music was very important,” she says. Pato released her first bagpipe album in Spain in 1999, when the style was in fashion. “We gaita [i.e., bagpipe] players became something like pop stars in the world-music tradition.” Despite the fame and fortune that came with her early successes, at the age of 24 she boldly decided to set aside the bagpipes and move to New York City to earn a Doctorate of Musical Arts in Collaborative Piano from Rutgers University. It was her reputation and ability as a piper, however, that led to playing opportunities in the Big Apple with a wide range of artists, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma (with whom she recorded the Grammy-winning 2009 album Songs of Joy and Peace) and the guys who would become her quartet. In recognition of her unique talents, Pato was recruited by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities to travel several times a year to the remote Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana as part of the “Turnaround: Arts” program. “It targets the six lowest-performing schools in the country, and it has transformed me,” Pato says. “The challenge is to use music and to help turn around a failing school through the arts.” Pato has also been transformed by her recent immersion in jazz. “There are rules, but there is also freedom,” she says. “It’s a mixture of things I couldn’t find in either classical music or traditional music. The bagpipe is a very limited instrument chromatically and in range, but I love bending notes and playing a glissando. I love reaching for a note that doesn’t exist but making your ear believe that I actually have found it.”

CRISTINA PATO Lucid Culture • May 17, 2015

High-Voltage Bagpiper Cristina Pato Brings Her Explosive Spanish Sounds to Subculture Even in an age when the mainstream is full of all kinds of esoterica, Cristina Pato has a particularly individualistic choice of axe: the Galician bagpipe. Her sound is wild, feral yet virtuosic and breathtakingly fast. She leads a similarly explosive band with accordion and a rhythm section. Fresh off a residency at Harvard, theYo-Yo Ma collaborator and member of the Silk Road Ensembleis bringing her deliriously fun, hard-hitting flamenco and Romany-tinged instrumentals to New York at Subculture tonight, May 17 at 7:30 PM. Cover is $25 and worth it: if you really want to wind up the weekend on a high note, this is how to do it. Pato has a new album, Latina, a mix of shapeshifting numbers in a vast range of traditional Spanish rhythm, written by her bassist Edward Perez. The opening track, Prueba de Fuego – a fandango – is definitely a trial by fire. Jazz drummer Eric Doob pushes it with a brisk triplet rhythm until Pato goes spiraling into the stratosphere, then Perez takes a dancing solo, accordionist Victor Prieto adding some neat call-and-response lines. Maria Lando, a lando dance, has a slower groove like a staggered clave beat, the accordion adding a lushly wistful edge that Pato picks up with a raw, plaintive tone. Pato plays precise, tensely suspenseful, hard-hitting, jazz-inflected piano on The High Seas, a dramatic tanguillo number: the mesh of textures between the piano and accordion is downright delicious. Muiñeira de Chantada, a simple, rustic oropo-festejo tune, gives Pato a long launching pad for wailing bends and machinegunning, trilling riffage. Pato goes back to piano for Currulao de Crisis, a vamping number that hints at reggae, then flamenco, then hits nn unexpectedly balmy interlude that’s pure jazz and picks up once again from there. Then she picks up her pipes again and bounces her way through the Spanish counterpart to a tarantella – lots of cross-pollination in that part of the world and on this album. The lone cover here, Llegará, llegará, llegará, by Emilio Solla (who also has an excellent new album out) is a real epic. Prieto’s tango-tinged pulse anchors Pato’s lustrous upper-register flights over a galloping groove, up to a bustling piano pasage, then a lively, expansive accordion solo that hits a peak when Pato wails on the pipes again. The final cut is the joyously if somewhat acidally shuffling Let’s Festa, the closest thing to Romany jazz here. There’s also a bonus track, a take of the tarantella without Pato’s breathless explanation of how closely interrelated Italian and Spanish folk traditions are. Sanitized yuppie exotica this is not: Gipsy Kings, eat your hearts out.

CRISTINA PATO Latin Post • May 15, 2015

Cristina Pato on 'Latina,' Yo-Yo Ma & Saving Classical Music BY DAVID SALAZAR When people think of bagpipers, Scotland enters the consciousness. But don't say that to Cristina Pato, a Galician bagpiper who also has careers as a pianist and composer. For Pato, the bagpipes are her passion, and she is set to release a new album entitled "Latina," which she noted is an exploratory journey of what it means to be Latino across numerous cultures. Pato became a star in her home country before moving to the U.S. to obtain her doctorate. She has had the pleasure of performing alongside a plethora of major artists, including Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. Her ensemble the Migration Band is slated to perform in New York on Sunday, and Pato recently spoke with Latin Post about her new album, her multiple careers and how she believes classical music can be saved. David Salazar: Let's start off by talking a bit about your album "Latina" and your inspirations? Cristina Pato: For me it was a way to try and find a meaning for the word "Latina." I am from Galicia in Spain, and when I am there, they call me Galician. When I tour Europe, I am called a Spaniard. Ever since I moved to the U.S., the word Latina has been used to define me. So I wanted to explore the roots of the word through music. This comes from a mixture of working with my band for the last four years and the curiosity of finding the connections with the country of the origin of the word, Italy. For me this is also a way to explore different ways of understanding music. My father was an accordion player. He was from Galicia but immigrated to Venezuela in the 60s. His way of playing Galician music with Venezuelan roots really showed me how beautiful it is when you try to find the positives of immigrations. In that sense, the album is a journey through all these countries using rhythm that connects all the kinds of music. If you can define us with one word, then with music we can define all of us with one rhythm and how we use it in different countries.

DS: What would you like audiences to take away from the album?

CP: The first idea when you look at an album of bagpipes is probably not a Latin album, right? When you ask a person where they think the instrument is originally from they automatically go to Scotland. History is more complicated than that. Galicia had a little bit of everything, and for me my instrument is a metaphor for human migration and how much we can tell through one sound.

I am not trying to break any clichés through the bagpipes, but it is more about my story of immigration. My parents went to Venezuela and back to Galicia, and I moved from Galicia to the United States.

LP: You have collaborated with a plethora of major artists -- anyone whose impact has remained with you throughout your career?

Cristina Pato Latin Post ● May 15, 2015 page 2 of 3 CP: There are many artists that I have the honor to play with and have taught me so much. But I have to confess that Yo-Yo Ma is my mentor. He is the person with whom I have worked with for eight years in this country. He has changed my understanding of the power of music and how much culture really matters. His endless curiosity and generosity continues to impact me. He is constantly looking for new projects like this one with an open mind, but he is also always teaching us lessons in humanity. DS: How did you first start working with him? CP: I moved to the U.S. 10 years ago to get my doctorate in Classical piano at Rutgers University. In my first semester a composer named Osvaldo Golijov came to do a workshop. And I was assigned to be his pianist for the day. So we talked about Galician music and about how it was a big deal in Argentina. We were talking about bagpipes, and then he discovered that I had another life back in Spain as a bagpiper. And a few months after that he was watching a piece for Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. And he invited me to join them for that piece. It was like finding a home, the home I had been looking for all of my life.

DS: You are a bagpiper, pianist and composer? How do these three distinct disciplines complement one another? How do organize your time in order to excel in each craft?

CP: I don't know if I can excel in any of them. But for me I could not choose. My career as a pianist is because when I started playing in Galicia, it was not possible to get a degree as a bagpiper. My parents wanted me to have a classical education and deepen my understanding what it meant to be a musician. I came from a academic career because most of my family could not have an education. My parents believed in giving us everything that they could not have. So my mother really believed in my getting that doctorate. And I wanted to honor her wish in that way. Classical music has given me ways to explore and deepen my understanding of different kinds of styles and music. On the other hand, the Galician bagpipes have always given me new ways to connect with audiences that I could not get as a pianist. In Galicia, you play the bagpipes to make people happy and dance and bring them together. That is the kind of experience I can never get as a pianist. I was always between the two worlds, looking to connect the two, and I could not. In Spain I could never really connect the two because they belonged to very different realms. But here I have been able to find more of a connection. DS: And your career as a composer? CP: My career as a composer started as a means of survival. No one needs a bagpiper in their lives. Because I could not get anyone to compose for the bagpipes, I did it myself. I have written arrangements for other ensembles. DS: You received your doctoral in the U.S. How was studying in America different from studying in your native Spain? How do think America's relationship with music differs from Europe's? CP: In Spain, cultural activities were usually related to government money. In this country it is usually related to philanthropy. So the relationship between the power of how much culture matters and the audience is very different.

Cristina Pato Latin Post ● May 15, 2015 page 3 of 3 I don't know which model is better because they both have their pros and cons. But one thing I like in the U.S. is that everyone here comes from a different plays. The curiosity that you find when you go to a music school in the U.S. is something I find fascinating. People want to know about your story because all the stories are different. In Spain, music is not in a university but in a conservatory. So you are placed into a little bubble of music. In the U.S., I get to work constantly with other universities. For example, this week I am in Santa Barbara and I am working with a linguistics department and with some educational projects that they have here. We are looking for ways to connect different departments through the arts and I have done that in many other universities. I get to be a performer and work as an educator as well.

LP: You perform a wide range of musical genres including classical music and jazz. Attendance to classical music performances has declined in America over the last decades. What needs to happen from artists or arts organizations to reinvigorate and win back audiences? CP: If I expect an audience to like bagpipes and come to my show because they like bagpipes, then I probably won't get a lot of people coming to my show. There is no audience right now for my instrument because they do not know about it. Instead I had to do it the other way around, and I had to go to the community and introduce myself and win the community over. I have to speak the language of the community and understand it to get its attention. I have worked in both jazz and classical music in this country, and I can see how often one goes to the community while in the other the community goes to it. I wish that I could have a solution, but the only way to keep that side of the market alive is to start the journey all over again and how do they relate to community. Instead of waiting for the community, go to the community and start the conversation all over again.

CRISTINA PATO World Music Report • May 13, 2015

The late cellist Jacqueline Du Pré and the legendary percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, and now the virtuoso Galician bagpiper (gaita player) Cristina Pato… Very few musicians of any gender have more visceral energy and vivacity than these three musicians. Ms. Pato has something none of the other two musicians have: duende that wicked magic that lurks deep down in the soul and is awoken when the artist reaches the kind of intensity of expression that is as explosive as a coiled spring held down for too long. This music on Latina: The Latina 6/8 Suite gets to you if you open your heart. In fact it will pry open the gateway to your soul and if you resist, it will get you anyway. Such is its impactful energy. The Suite has been written in the dancing rhythm and tempo of 6/8, which means the joyful rhythms of Landó, Joropo, Festejo and other maddeningly joyous dance forms such as those. I can’t think of anything like this that exists in written/recorded form. It’s truly a first. Cristina Pato - LatinaThe Cristina Pato Quartet gets under the skin of this long-limbed joyous masterpiece, performing with a lovely flexible sense of timing. Ms. Pato explodes the exquisitely angular lines in the statuesque contrapuntal “Fandango” allowing it effortlessly to unfold. Each ebullient sequence of the Suite locks arms with the other bounding and leaping across what you might imagine to be a never ending expanse of a waxen dance floor. The bagpiper is warmly spontaneous, unleashing ardent melodies as if from a medieval weapon. There is a forward drive at every turn; deliberate gestures inform the extraordinary brightness that lights up the forte passages, and she brings a huge range of colours overall. An obsessive perfectionist, Cristina Pato has polished these individual sections of the Suite into gleaming gems. Bassist Edward Pérez has not only explored the vivacious forms wholly in his versification, but he has also written idiomatically—never gratuitously flashy—but flamboyant nevertheless. Together with Cristina Pato, who also plays piano and sings when she has to, Edward Pérez and the rest of the quartet’s traversal of the various sections share that supple rhythmic flexibility. The Fandango is big-boned and generous with a depth and spaciousness that gives the piece an orchestral scale. Cristina Pato is particularly exciting in the sequences that sound best Vivace. She makes music that is powerfully and, at the same time, lovingly delivered, Mr. Pérez creating a glistening delicacy as a foil. The forward drive of the Landó, the Tanguillo, Joropo/Festejo and other dances enable the musicians to build up a kind of explosive end to this singularly high-voltage work. I cannot think of an extended piece—a suite, or otherwise—that is as inspiring as well. This is truly a miraculous piece of music by a musician whose star—duende or not—is certainly on the rise.

CRISTINA PATO Latina Press Release • March 23, 2015

It is incredible to think of how many of the world’s cultures are linked. From the origins of the Latin languages in Europe to the music of Afro-Spanish South America, the links between the two continents are diverse and deep. The tremendous Galician bagpiper and pianist Cristina Pato decided to further explore one of these chains of cultural adaptation, specifically through the evolution of six beat rhythmic patterns originating in the Latin music of Europe and migrating to South America. Her new recording - Latina - provides a diverse program of musical styles performed by an expert group of musicians fluent in jazz and folkloric music. Originally hailing from the northwestern province of Galicia in Spain, Pato has become something of a sensation since arriving in the United States. She has performed regularly with her own ensemble and released a recording (Migrations, 2012). Pato has become a member of Yo Yo Ma’s celebrated Silk Road Ensemble, which has toured the world. The concept for Pato’s Latina stemmed from her fascination with the word and what it has come to mean. Altough originally referring to a group ressident in the Italian peninsula, the term Latinos/Latinas is now generally used to refer to individuals whose ancestry stems from Spanish origins. In the same way that Latin based languages have spread widely, the musical elements of Latin cultures have been propagated across continents. Through her musical investigations, Pato discovered the recurrent use of a 6/8 pattern (six beats of quarter notes in a waltz-like feel) from the tarantellas of Italy all the way to the Afro-Peruvian style of landó on the Pacific coast of South America. For Pato, finding the connections between these diverse cultures has helped her to find her own more positive meaning to a term by which she found herself constantly defined, Latina. For Latina, Pato commissioned her friend and bassist Edward Perez to write music that would frame the journey of a specific rhythm with roots in Italy and Spain across the Atlantic where it ingrained itself in a multitude of musical cultures, including Peru and Colombia. Perez had lived in Peru for a time to study Afro-Peruvian music and introduced Pato to some of the styles, which immediately reminded her of the muiñeira, a Galician dance form in 6/8. To perform The Suite and the two additional compositions presented on Latina, Pato enlisted the expert Galician accordion player Victor Prieto, bassist and composer Edward Perez and the phenomenal Eric Doob on drums. The Latina 6/8 Suite is comprised of six pieces, each representing a different style using the 6/8 rhythms that migrated from Europe to the Americas. The vibrant first piece “Fandango: Prueba de Fuego” is named for the Spanish dance form that traversed the Atlantic ; this is followed by “Landó: María Landó,” a wonderful example of the Afro-Peruvian form written by poet César Calve and legendary singer Chabuca Granda. The flamenco influenced “Tanguillo: The High Seas” is a rousing, stately piece that features Pato on piano. The Suite continues with a piece in Venezuelan form, “Joropo-Festejo: Muiñera de Chantada,” a party song that utilizes the Venezuelan rhythm over the Galician. The next piece “Currulao: Currulao de Crisis” is an example of a Colombian criolla rhythm, usually arranged for marimba, voice and drums, with Pato’s expert piano playing substituting for marimba. The Suite concludes with “Tarantella-Muiñeira: Epilogue” which starts with the Italian rhythm, and quickly morphs into the exuberant Galician folk tune.

Cristina Pato Latina Press Release page 2 of 2 The program continues with fellow bagpiper and Nuevo tango composer Emilio Solla’s “Llegará, llegará, llegará,” which expressively blends Pato’s Galician folkloric style with the Argentine tango. Victor Prieto’s “Let’s Fiesta” finishes the album with a Brazilian backbeat. Cristina Pato’s fascinating exploration of the different rhythms that have migrated throughout the world via populations with Latin roots has birthed a wonderful collection of music on Latina. The diversity of sound and texture that can be generated from the same time signature (here a simple 6/8) is an intriguing parallel to the intricacies of the seemingly simple label Latina.

CRISTINA PATO Texas Public Radio • May 4, 2015

A Spanish musician is pushing the limits of her chosen instrument, and now she’s coming to San Antonio. “My name is Cristina Pato. I am a bagpiper from Galicia, in Spain.” You probably haven’t heard bagpipers make the kinds of sounds she does. (Hit "Listen" to hear her music) “For me, trying to make the instrument work outside of its comfort zone, is always a beautiful challenge. I have been playing bagpipes since I was four years old. That means it’s like an extension of my personality.” A large personality that has assembled a very capable band to extend the boundaries of bagpipes. “Drums, accordion and double bass. That is not at all traditional music” she laughs. She says while many assume bagpipes originated in Scotland, they didn’t. First created in Persia, they spread through the Mediterranean. “If we go back to the thirteenth century we can already find representations of Galician bagpipers in all of our literature from that century. In Galicia everybody plays bagpipes. The instrument is literally the national instrument of Galicia.” Musical Bridges Around The World is bringing Pato to the San Fernando Cathedral for a concert, and she’s looking forward to it. “I was told that it [San Fernando Cathedral] was a very, very beautiful place. It’s a very unique city…it feels a lot like home for a person like me.”

CRISTINA PATO Worcester Telegram & Gazette • April 20, 2014

Holy Cross launches 'Arts Transcending Borders' BY NANCY SHEEHAN Old tires, playgrounds and Galician bagpipes will play a role in a new initiative at the College of the Holy Cross along with academic disciplines as diverse as economics, math, music, theater and art. Called "Arts Transcending Borders," and styled as ATB@HC, the new initiative is designed to forge a collaboration between the fine and performing arts and other non-arts areas of study in hopes of enriching students' academic lives and maybe finding new creative solutions to challenges locally and worldwide. The program will launch with a concert at 4:30 p.m. April 23 by Galician bagpiper, classical pianist and composer Cristina Pato accompanied by her band, Migrations. The concert, in the Hogan Campus Center ballroom, is open free to the public. The performance serves as a musical kickoff after which Pato, a member of famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma's innovative Silk Road Project, will return to Holy Cross in the fall as ATB@HC's first artist in residence. It is one of many "firsts" for her. She also was the first female to release an album of music of the gaita, or Galician bagpipes. That was about 15 years ago, and she didn't think of it as a major milestone at the time. Pato, who now lives in Manhattan, said bagpipes are the national instrument in her native Galicia on the North Coast of Spain. "I was the youngest of four sisters, and we all played the bagpipes," she said. But she was the one who actually made a record, one she now sees as a positive influence. "Now I look back and think of how many little girls back then followed that path and are playing bagpipes now and that's beautiful," she said. There have been several recordings since and accolades that have included The New York Times calling Pato "a virtuosic burst of energy" and the Wall Street Journal naming her "one of the living masters of the gaita." ATB@HC, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will support visiting artists on campus for three years while a new performing arts center is designed and built. The arts center is funded by a $25 million gift from Cornelius B. Prior Jr., Holy Cross class of '56. It was the largest single donation in the college's history. In addition to visiting artists, ATB@HC will allow the founding of CreateLab, a new effort in which eight faculty members from seven disciplines will team teach a course that will focus on having students from different majors collaborate with each other. Areas include music, theater, visual arts, math, psychology, sociology and economics. "The current research out there shows that when people work together in teams they come up with more creative solutions to solving the problems of our society and our world," Lynn Kremer, professor of theater at Holy Cross, said. One study has shown that visual impressions vary greatly when an image of a person standing in a doorway is shown to an economist, for example, as opposed to a visual artist.

Cristina Pato Worcester Telegram & Gazette • April 20, 2014 page 2 of 2 "The economist might just see the person and see the edge of the door frame but the artistic types see a bigger, broader expanse and that's what they bring into the creative team — these different ways of viewing the same thing," Kremer said. The teachers will create assignments for the students who then will tackle them in teams. "All the theater kids can't join together and work together. They have to work with the sociologists, the psychologists, the economics and math majors," Kremer said. "And then together they'll come up with creative solutions to these challenges." The challenges have yet to be devised. But what might they be like? "One idea was to go into the Worcester community and just see what you perceive that could benefit from being sort of tweaked or fixed and then create a solution for that and present that to the class," she said. Kremer is also considering tapping the alumni roster for some strong examples of creative problem solving. One possible source might be Jonathan Racek, class of '95, an architect who teaches at the University of Indiana and is founder and executive director of Play360, a nonprofit that trains organizations to build low-cost educational resources such as playgrounds throughout the developing world. "He builds playgrounds out of resources that are available in that community," Kremer said. "Everybody has tires so he makes swings out of old tires. He makes things you can climb on out of tires or bamboo or whatever is available in that community. We're thinking of maybe bringing someone like him into the group and he could talk about his work and also encourage our students to come up with some ideas on their own." As guest artist, Pato will be in the classroom working with the students as her touring schedule permits. The ATB@HC theme the first year will be "Time, Memory and Identity," which fits in with a stunning new composition Pato has written called "My Lethe Story, the River of Forgetfulness," about her own mother's memory loss. (You can see Silk Road performing the piece on YouTube). On the scientific side, the theme also meshes with the extensive research on memory, identity and time done by Mark Freeman, chairman of the psychology department at Holy Cross, who also is involved with ATB@HC, Kremer said. "So when we got the two of them together. they got very excited about working together and doing something that might have a creative result," she said. Pato also will focus on the many connections that can be made by focusing on music, memory and identity. And, although she will be a visiting artist, she says Holy Cross feels like home to her. Perhaps that's because the college echoes the strong Catholic traditions and close-knit sense of community she knew in Galicia, but there is something harder to define as well, she said. "I don't know but there is just something about that college," she said. "It's like the perfect size and the perfect place to actually explore different ways of connecting and working together, and, although I work in other university settings, this one is going to be very special, especially because the theme is very dear to my own experience, and that's really exciting for me."

The bagpipe has a brief but noble history in jazz, beginning with Philadelphia saxophonist Rufus Harley, who was inspired to take up the instrument when he saw Scotland’s Black Watch regiment performing during John F. Kennedy’s funeral procession. Harley became a symbol for cross-cultural exploration, finding in the ancient and widespread bagpipe an instrument that spoke to underlying unities. It was the era of John Coltrane’s signature soprano saxophone sound, that keening wail and those bending pitches that would draw jazz and the sound of an Indian shehnai into the same orbit on “My Favorite Things” and “AfroBlue”. The bagpipe, with its drone pipes and continuous sound took the resemblance another step further. While Harley may have been limited by the instrument’s relatively narrow range and limited pitches, his work touched on elemental mysteries. Significantly, Albert Ayler played bagpipes on Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe. These two new recordings of improvising pipers are very different, but they both speak to the adaptability of the instrument. While the bagpipe is most immediately associated with Scotland, its global tradition includes Galicia in Northern Spain, where it’s called a gaita. Cristina Pato is a Galician piper who has recorded traditional music extensively and has been a member of Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, absorbing a host of international idioms. On Migrations, she also plays fluent jazz piano and sings in styles that range from infectious bossa nova (Jobim’s “Dindi”) to the keening, shouted wail of Galician traditional songs. Her band of accordionist Victor Prieto, bassist Edward Perez and drummer Eric Doob provides engaging support and there are numerous guests adding other colors, including tablas, harp and bouzouki. The music mixes intensity and levity with a charm akin to the Hot Club of France and Pato’s take on Miles Davis and/or Bill Evans’ “Blue in Green” is probably the most technically accomplished piping in a traditional jazz idiom to date. British Paul Dunmall is a tenor saxophonist of great power who plays in a manner that derives directly from Coltrane and Ayler and he brings all the intensity of energy-school free jazz to his piping. His 2003 release Solo Bagpipes (FMR) was a work of great vision and on Pipe & Drum Dunmall plays in an absolutely fundamental ensemble with the equally distinguished Mark Sanders on drums, the two manifesting a ferocity that speaks of timeless trances and visions and elemental kinships. While Pato at times seems to tame the pipes, Dunmall is interested in setting them free in all their wildness, their sounds braying and magisterial, their trills and split tones multiplying, their air bladder a primordial mechanism for circular breathing. Dunmall’s approach resembles at times Evan Parker’s to the soprano saxophone, but with a narrower range. By the concluding “Supernatural Is Natural”, Dunmall and Sanders match the dense, entrancing wail of the massed winds and percussion of the Master Musicians of Joujouka - powerful stuff indeed.

For more information, visit sunnysiderecords.com and fmr-records.com. Pato is at Joe’s Pub Jun. 5th. See Calendar.

THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD | June 2013 17

Migrations Cristina Pato (Sunnyside)

Pipe & Drum Paul Dunmall/

Mark Sanders (FMR)

by Stuart Broomer

CRISTINA PATO Downbeat Magazine • May 2013

Galician Grace BY TED PANKEN Fifteen minutes into Cristina Pato’s first set on Jan. 15 at Manhattan’s Jazz Standard in support of her new album, Migrations (Sunnyside), after uncorking two ascendant solos on gaita (the Galician bagpipe), she took the microphone.

“How many people here live in New York?” Pato asked. “How many think they are New Yorkers? That’s what this album is about. So many extraordinary people who find their voice in a place that is not your place.”

A New Yorker since 2005, Pato is a native of Ourense, an old Roman city of 100,000 located in the Galicia region of northwest Spain. Recipient of an award saluting her as the 2012 Premio Galega do Año (Galician of the Year), Pato is a pop star in her homeland. Her personal charisma comes through in her work with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble—she solos extensively in two sections of Osvaldo Golijov’s suite “Air To Air,” documented on the 2009 album Off The Map (World Village), and on a six-movement Vijay Iyer commission titled “Playlist For An Extreme Occasion” that features her on piano and gaita.

That charisma is also palpable in Pato’s ravishing fanfare, improvisation and outro on “Pan Piper,” from the 2011 various artists album Miles Español: New Sketches Of Spain (eOne), produced by Bob Belden. Conversely, on the 2010 album Soas (Boa), Pato showcases her considerable classical piano skills, supporting singer Rosa Cedrón on a program of primarily late 19th century Galician art songs.

On Migrations, arranger Emilio Solla creates improvisational contexts in which Pato, accordionist Victor Prieto, bassist Edward Perez, drummer Eric Doob and an assortment of guests (drawn partly from the Silk Road Ensemble) address not only the traditional muiñeira and polka repertoire with which gaita is associated, but pieces that Pato says “take the bagpipe out of the comfort zone.” These include two Solla originals with tango and South Indian flavors, Miles Davis’ “Blue In Green” and Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Dindi.” In addition to playing gaita, piano, flute and pandeireta, Pato contributes vocals to the disc.

“My constant challenge is to find the right language,” Pato explained in a Galician restaurant near her Greenwich Village home. “[The gaita] is a monodic instrument with 14 notes, and not the full chromatic scale. Also, you are always fortissimo, yet the idea of dynamics and details is very important for jazz. To find chromaticisms that aren’t on the instrument, I developed ways to slide and bend, trying to improvise more with colors and noise and texture than the actual melody. With piano, you have all these notes you can use; on gaita, making something interesting with those 14 notes keeps me always thinking.”

Cristina Pato Downbeat Magazine • May, 2013 page 2 of 2 For her piano gigs, Pato explained that she dons glasses and puts up her green-fringed hair: “It’s the more polished Cristina, while the bagpipe is my wild side—like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

Pato dual-tracked early in Ourense, studying classical piano at conservatory and, two buildings away, attending a bagpipe school. By her teens, she was the only soloist in a touring bag- pipe band. By age 18, she had recorded her first solo bagpipe album. At the time, she was continuing her studies toward a degree at Liceu Conservatory in Barcelona, where she’d moved at 17, the year she also began taking jazz piano classes with Guillermo Klein. Shortly after moving to New York, a chance meeting with Prieto—a fellow Galician and Liceu classmate— rekindled her jazz interest.

“As a pianist who never improvised and a bagpiper who was constantly improvising, jazz helped me take the piano outside the classical world and take the gaita outside the traditional world,” Pato said. “Victor’s freedom and facility helps me with my instrument, and the accordion is the perfect match for the bagpipe. The Silk Road Ensemble keeps opening my eyes to how things connect.”

CRISTINA PATO Wall Street Journal • January 10, 2013

The Jazz Scene: Conference Calls, Brass Bands, Free Thinkers BY WILL FRIEDWALD The 32-year-old Spanish virtuoso makes unique music on an uncommon instrument: She's one of the major living masters of the gaita (though she also plays piano and flute, and sings), and her performances feature elements of world and folk music, pop, classical (often in the company of Yo Yo Ma) and even choreography. So where else would she appear in New York but Jazz Standard? The gaita is sometimes described as the Galician equivalent of the bagpipes, yet the sound Ms. Pato extracts from this device (though it often looks like she's wrestling an octopus) is more a cross between a soprano saxophone and an accordion. Tuesday's show marks the release of her new album, "Migrations," which, on tracks like Bill Evans's "Blue in Green" and Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Dindi," demonstrates the transmutability of Ms. Pato's playing and singing, as well as why she belongs in a jazz club as much as anywhere else.

CRISTINA PATO The New York Times • January 14, 2013

Review: NEW MUSIC Cristina Pato’s ‘Migrations’ BY NATE CHINEN Cristina Pato reaches what sounds like full steam only a handful of times on her perfectly titled new album, “Migrations,” and that touch of restraint feels strategic and knowing. Ms. Pato is a pianist of percussive clarity, and a flutist and singer of warmer, softer effect. But the instrument on which she slays is the gaita, a bagpipe of traditional use in Galicia, her homeland in the northwest corner of Spain. She’s a virtuoso, and when she opens the floodgates of her technique, as she does on an Emilio Solla tune called “Remain Alert,” the force can knock you back a few steps. She knows to use it sparingly.

She also knows, perhaps through her experience in Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, that authenticity and adaptability can be compatible under the right conditions. “Migrations,” with its suggestion of an itinerant and even mongrelized cultural legacy, sets the stage nicely for her: it’s an album suffused with awareness of tradition but breezy about its debts.

The history of the gaita stretches back centuries, into a shrouded antiquity. Its popular resurgence in recent years is less mysterious, involving the pageantry of Galician pipe bands and the easy flair of players like Carlos Nuñez. As if to offer a dose of reassurance, Ms. Pato includes a few folkloric themes here, stacking them near the album’s close.

But she opens with “Muiñeira for Cristina,” an original take on a traditional form, by the Galician accordionist Victor Prieto. It features a sparkling guest turn by the Colombian harpist Edmar Castañeda, and assertive rhythmic work by Ms. Pato’s core band, with Mr. Prieto, the bassist Edward Pérez, the drummer Eric Doob and the percussionist John Hadfield. (She’ll have the same lineup at the Jazz Standard on Tuesday night.)

Ms. Pato is a dynamic improviser, not afraid to use the shrill keen of her instrument as an expressive tool. She has the added benefit of some smart arrangements — by Mr. Solla, an Argentine pianist known for blending jazz and tango — that embrace a kind of world-music utopianism, stirring in tabla, bouzouki and cello. She puts herself forward as an ambassador of this ideal, especially on Mr. Solla’s “Gaitango (A Cristina Pato),” which has her playing gaita and piano, and her own “Rosiña,” featuring flute and vocals.

Her breathy singing, on “Rosiña” as on the bossa-nova standard “Dindi,” is nothing special. But any trace of vulnerability is welcome, on an album that otherwise makes little accommodation for it.

___________________________________________________________________________________ 348 west 38th street, suite 12b, new york, NY, 10018 | phone +1.212.564.4606 | fax +1.646.607.1734

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Release Date: 1/15/2013

Cristina Pato Migrations

“The idea of things and persons finding their space in another place without losing their identity serves here as the metaphor of my own way of finding a musical language that would honor my roots, my instinct, my education and all the beautiful things I have learned from other artists in my personal trip…” The quote above serves as a mission statement for the singular musician Cristina Pato and her musical quest to develop a personal style and concept. Pato plays both gaita (Galician bagpipe) and piano, two very different instruments requiring a diverse knowledge of both folkloric and institutional classical musical forms. The task that she has taken on has been to create a working synthesis between the two. Pato’s new release Migrations (Sunnyside, Jan. 2013) showcases an intriguing amalgamation of styles from the music of her native northern Spanish roots to jazz, world and classical sources. The project’s inception in 2004 occurred when Pato relocated to New York to continue her doctoral studies at Rutgers University. Coincidental meetings between her and composer Osvaldo Golijov and accordionist Victor Prieto - the former introducing concepts connecting traditional and contemporary music and the latter promoting a freedom in concept in jazz that allowed for the inclusion of her Galician identity - made a tremendous impact on Pato and her music. Pato’s music bloomed as she began to collaborate with different eclectic ensembles such as Yo Yo Ma’s The Silk Road Ensemble and Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra. With her new ensemble and a new musical concept, Pato has created a unique and personal musical style that echoes her roots and the sounds of her new home, the creative melting pot of New York City. The core ensemble that Pato put together includes her Spanish friend, accordionist Victor Prieto along with bassist Edward Perez and drummer Eric Doob. A number of guests are featured on some of the tracks, including harpist Edmar Castañeda and percussionist John Hadfield. Producer Emilio Solla assisted Pato tremendously on Migrations, adding compositions and arrangements to the program. The recording begins with Solla’s arrangement of Prieto’s “Muiñeira for Cristina,” a dancing performance featuring Pato’s expressive gaita along with Castañeda’s striking harp work. “Muiñeira de Carmen” follows with a plaintive accordion melody and Pato on piano, playing stately and melancholic. Miles Davis’s “Blue In Green” is Pato’s second interpretation of the trumpeter’s music (the first being Bob Belden’s Miles Español project) with a lilting reading. Jobim and Oliveira’s “Dindi” presents Pato’s affecting vocals lighting up this Brazilian evergreen.

___________________________________________________________________________________ 348 west 38th street, suite 12b, new york, NY, 10018 | phone +1.212.564.4606 | fax +1.646.607.1734

_______________________ _____________________ ____________________________ www.sunnysiderecords.com | www.sunnysidezone.com | sunnyside@sunnysidrecords.com

“Gaitango” is a riveting attempt in uniting the gaita with tango. “Jota de Pontevedra” is a traditional song performed frequently by Galician musicians, appearing here in a spare, haunting arrangement. The introspective “Rosiña” is a lovely ballad featuring Pato on flute and vocals alongside Xan Padrón on bouzouki. “Remain Alert” is a startling, uptempo piece featuring tabla player Sandeep Das. “Pandeirada Bestia” is another traditional song featuring the Galician pandeireta (a Galician percussion instrument) with invigorating results. The disc closes with “Mala Entraña Ou / O Pasodobre de Paderne,” another standard composition which had been transformed into a hit recording by Rachel Meyer in 1934. Here Pato is accompanied by the great gaiteiro Suso Vaamonde in a spirited exchange. The music on Migrations is a fascinating listen, which provides a new and unique take on traditional meeting contemporary musical style. Pato’s interpretive voice on both gaita and piano make the music of her native Galicia and jazz standards sound wholly individual and captivating.

For More Info: Bret Sjerven / bret@sunnysiderecords.com

CRISTINA PATO NPR Music • January 19, 2013

A Bagpipe-Slinging Spaniard Finds A Home In New York Jazz BY NPR STAFF LISTEN HERE

Cristina Pato is a jazz pianist from Spain who also plays flute and sings. But on her new album, Migrations, there's a striking sound not often heard in jazz: a bagpipe. Pato has been playing the traditional gaita (pronounced "GY-tah"), a version of the bagpipe from her native region of Galicia, since she was 4 years old.

"I think right now in Galicia, there are more bagpipe players than soccer players, which is a very big statement to say," Pato says. "But, you know, bagpipes, they are all around the world, and they are all related to the people where they are from. ... It's probably one of the oldest instruments in history."

The gaita's stark, commanding sound is an odd fit for jazz, but Pato says she's been able to use that contrast to her advantage.

"I think that is the reason I get so passionate about the instrument," she says. "It has so many beautiful limitations that really make you work harder to get things done."

Here, Pato speaks with NPR's Scott Simon about moving from Spain to New York, fielding bagpipe questions from strangers and getting up the nerve to record a Miles Davis tune. Hear more of their conversation by clicking the audio link here.