Alternating Currents Live is a concert series co-produced by WMSE-FM, and Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. These concerts take place in the gallery at Woodland Pattern Book Center (720 East Locust) and are recorded for broadcast on the WMSE-FM the following Sunday evening between 7 and 9 p.m. Since its inauguartion in 1995 the series has presented over 90 events featuring such wide ranging music from composers, performers, and improvisers such as Mats Gustafsson, Jaap Blonk, Robin Holcomb, Pauline Oliveros, Tom Hamilton, Evan Parker, Henry Grimes, Nicole Mitchell, Mike Reed, Peter Brotzmann, Ken Vandermark, Dave Rempis, Guillermo Gregorio, Michael Zerang, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and many others. For a complete listing of our past events and a little background on the history of this series follow this link to Woodland Pattern’s archives.
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The following is a short article on the series reprinted from Milwaukee’s Riverwest News which featured several articles on Woodland Pattern Book Center in its December 2009 issue:
LIVE AT WOODLAND PATTERN
Having been a dedicated follower for many years of the creative music scene in cities across this country and Europe, I am well aware of the transient nature of performance venues willing to open their doors to music that is off the beaten path, often challenging, and living its tenuous but persistent existence at the fringes of conventional musical tastes, classical or pop. If you love this sort of music then you must be willing to go wherever it takes you, literally, to independent galleries, loft spaces, cafes, and small out-of-the-way bookstores owned by fellow enthusiasts. On this trek you quickly learn that these establishments have their own precarious existence in our culture of mass production and mass consumption. This was as true forty years ago as it is today.
I began visiting Woodland Pattern in the early 80s when there was no comparable single venue in Chicago or anywhere else in the midwest for artists like Derek Bailey, John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros, Leroy Jenkins, and many others. Even a few years later, when performance spaces began to appear in Chicago, Woodland Pattern (its music program under the direction of Thomas Gaudynski) remained an international destination for consistently high quality and uniquely creative musicians.
When I moved to the Milwaukee area in 1993, Woodland Pattern Book Center’s gallery remained a vibrant center for literary, visual, and sound arts. To be invited to organize their music series (in connection with the radio show Alternating Currents I was already hosting in WMSE) was an honor beyond measure. In the course of their first ten years they had set a very high standard in the range and depth of the artists they presented.
Alternating Currents Live is now in its 15th year and we have presented close to 100 events in this Spring and Fall concert series. A few years ago English trombonist Paul Rutherford (who had been playing all over the world since the very early 1960s) told me before his solo concert: “I can’t believe I am finally playing here.” When double bassist Peter Kowald visited here for the first time in 1998 he commented to his audience: “If I could play in spaces like this for the rest of my life I would be a very happy man.” Such is the international reputation of Woodland Pattern Book Center.
Musicians who play here often tell me they feel they have performed for one of the most attentive and informed audiences they have ever experienced. Such encounters have built Woodland Pattern’s international reputation as a ‘world class’ music venue. This reputation does not rest in the number of seats it houses, the number of tickets it sells, or the fees it can offer to touring artists, but, rather, in the richness of experience it offers to performers and audience alike. Unique among literary centers in its vision to encompass all the visual arts, music and sound, film, and book arts, Woodland Pattern embodies the belief that engagement with all these endeavors is essential to a rich and inquisitive life.
- Hal Rammel, December 2009
