Akropolis Reed Quintet & Shara Nova
Biographie Akropolis Reed Quintet & Shara Nova
Akropolis Reed Quintet
Celebrating their 13th year making music with “faultless detail and refreshing artistry” (I Care if You Listen) as a “collective voice driven by real excitement and a sense of adventure” (The Wire), Akropolis has “taken the chamber music world by storm” (Fanfare). As the first reed quintet to grace the Billboard Charts (May 2021), the untamed band of 5 reed players and entrepreneurs are united by a shared passion: to make music that sparks joy and wonder.
Winner of 7 national chamber music prizes including the 2014 Fischoff Gold Medal, “the performance standards of Akropolis are award winning for a reason” (Fanfare). Remaining the same 5 members since their founding in 2009, Akropolis delivers 120 concerts and educational events worldwide each year and has premiered and commissioned over 130 works by living artists and composers. They are the first ensemble of their kind to grace the stage on noteworthy series like Oneppo (Yale University), Chamber Music San Antonio, Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.), Summerwinds Münster (Germany), Flagler Museum (Palm Beach), and many more. The “rise of the reed quintet” (Chamber Music America) and Akropolis’ “infallible musicality and huge vitality” (Fanfare) make them one of the most sought-after chamber ensembles today.
Experimenters and creators at their core, “there’s nothing tentative in their approach, and that extends to their programming of multifariously challenging and imaginative new works” (The Wire). Akropolis has collaborated with poets, a metal fabricator, dancers, small business owners, string quartets, pop vocalists, and more. Currently, Akropolis is collaborating with GRAMMY-nominated pianist/composer Pascal Le Boeuf and drummer Christian Euman on an album and touring program drawing classical and jazz idioms together to reflect on American identity, entitled, Are We Dreaming the Same Dream?
Akropolis’ chief collaborators are youth and their Detroit community. Winner of the 2015 Fischoff Educator Award and a nonprofit organization which has received 5 consecutive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Akropolis runs a summer festival in Detroit called Together We Sound and holds an annual, school year long residency at Cass Tech, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Detroit School of Arts high schools. Akropolis believes anyone can compose great music and during their 20-21 season premiered and recorded more than 30 works by youth aged 12-22 alone.
An engine perpetually generating new sounds and ideas, Akropolis’ 22-23 season will include world premieres by Pulitzer Prize finalist Augusta Read Thomas and Omar Thomas; imaginative renditions of music by Ravel, Bernstein, Rameau, Shostakovich, and Gershwin; Storm Warning, a concerto grosso for reed quintet and wind band by Roshanne Etezady; and touring their recently released 4th album, Ghost Light, lauded for its “range, agility, and grace” (The Whole Note), by “exploring everything from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to racial violence in their native Detroit” (AnEarfull).
The “pure gold” (San Francisco Chronicle) Akropolis Reed Quintet performs worldwide and is represented exclusively by Ariel Artists. They come to you with joy and wonder, ready to be unleashed.
Founded in 2009, the Billboard charting, 7-time national prize winning Akropolis Reed Quintet makes music that sparks joy and wonder with “infallible musicality and huge vitality” (Fanfare Magazine).
Shara Nova
a classically trained vocalist and self-taught multi-instrumentalist who records dazzling, shapeshifting music as My Brightest Diamond, has always felt like an outsider. Over the course of four groundbreaking albums, she has resisted the conventions of genre, blending elements of rock, art pop, and chamber music into a sound totally her own. While fiercely independent, she like everyone else, still desires connectedness. This tension is at the core of her new album—A Million And One—where she has once again reinvented herself.
Where did it all begin? Shara always knew she wanted to be a musician. She grew up in a family of traveling evangelicals, and together they crisscrossed the country, her father leading church choirs and her mother playing organ. When Shara was a teenager, they settled in a city outside Detroit. It was the early ‘90s, and hip-hop and soul were on the airwaves. Shara listened to everything from Run DMC to Stevie Wonder to Anita Baker and K C & the Sunshine Band. After studying opera, she moved to New York City, where she formed My Brightest Diamond in 2006, releasing her critically acclaimed debut album, Bring Me The Workhorse.
A Million And One sprung from a period of personal transformation for Shara. It comes just four years after her marriage came to an end. (Literally: Nova translates to ‘new’ in Latin.) And was written during a time that Detroit was going through a rebirth of its own. Shara returned to Michigan in 2008 and settled in Detroit, a city whose rich musical legacy—from Motown to the White Stripes—has always been an animating force for her. This time around, she sought to honor the city with music of her own. A Million And One is an homage to the sounds of Detroit, a love letter of sorts, but also a visceral trip backwards in time, to Shara’s formative teen years. “The album examines the quest for my individuality and the search for a deeper relationship to my body, my neighbors, and to the planet,” she says.
Each gem-like song is distinct, from the anthemic opener “It’s Me on the Dance Floor,” to the techno-infused “Supernova,” which calls to mind the work of pioneering Detroit producer Carl Craig. “You Wanna See My Teeth,” is a twisting, searing meditation on the death of Trayvon Martin. The album’s ten tracks represent a departure from the lush instrumentation of My Brightest Diamond’s previous work and into leaner, more raw territory, with beats and synths. Shara produced the album with the help of The Twilite Tone (Common, Gorillaz, Kanye West) and it was mixed by Andrew Scheps (Adele, Lana Del Rey, Beyoncé). Anchoring each song is the relationship between Shara’s vocals and drums from Earl Harvin (Seal, Sam Smith). Reborn free of ornament, Shara’s voice has never been more vulnerable—or more powerful.
