Featuring Pt Juncture WA, The Blue Cranes and more TBA
"Highly talented, highly collaborative and highly experimental, the Portland Cello Project is a dream team of instrumentalists." Anika Sabin, Willamette Week, Portland.
"To say that this is not your father's cello ensemble is a vast understatement." Barbara Mitchell, Portland Tribune.
"The Portland Cello Project liberate the cello and bring it back to the common folk. Kind of like those High Life commercials where the distro driver self-righteously shoplifts beer, but, you know, with cellos." Ezra Caraeff, Portland Mercury.
"Nobody brings chamber music to the masses like the Portland Cello Project." Alison Hallett, Portand Mercury.
"No longer are cellists hiding in the wings, reliving memories of traumatic junior-high orchestra performances. Gone is the discomfiture of lugging around a huge stringed beast." Paige Richmond, Willamette Week.
"Throw out everything you ever thought you knew about string ensembles. " The Portland Tribune.
"Comfortable asses or not, a PCP performance is always something to base your week on." The Portland Mercury.
Portland Cello Project will be playing as the opening band for Pink Martini June 3 at The Crystal Ballroom!
We will be performing a nicely balanced set (we’re actually quite proud of the balance), with everything in it, from Bon Jovi, to tangos, to unusual jazz medleys, to silly things, to classical things.
Joining us on stage for collaboration will be Jessyka Luzzi singing Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras number 5, and Nick Jaina, doing a couple of his own pieces arranged by Ali Ippolito.
We’re posting our videos on Vimeo as well as YouTube now. I always wondered why localcut and Endhits always post their videos with Vimeo, but now I know — it’s because the quality, especially of the sound, is much better. In the words of Adam Shearer (Weinland) in an email to us yesterday, “Vimeo kicks YouTube’s face off.”
Tomorrow, Friday May 2, The Cello Project is going to make a surprise appearance as the “opening band” for Gideon Freudmann’s CD release party at Mississippi Studios. We’re moving the mains out of the way in this tiny venue to cram as many cellists in as possible (at least 7). This is a rare opportunity to see us en masse in such an intimate space!
The room seats 85, so we expect it to be full, but comfortable — there are seats throughout the venue and a really nice ambiance.
The Portland Cello Project will be playing with Pink Martini June 3 at the Crystal Ballroom right here in Portland as part of FundFest 2008 — a benefit-festival-thing. Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the door. Tickets can be purchased now at the Crystal Ballroom’s ticket booth or online.
The performance is a benefit for Friends of Trees, which is a non-profit which “brings people in the Portland-Vancouver area together to plant trees along city streets and in urban natural areas.”
The Portland Cello Project and Heather Broderick will be on this year’s PDX Pop Now! Compilation! Does this mean we might be playing our favorite wonderful, free, all-ages, Portland music community-building event this summer (also put on by the great people at PDX Pop Now!)? We sincerely hope it’s a possibility.
Thank you to James Bash for writing such a comprehensive story on us for Crosscut Seattle. We are very grateful! We know James is a Portlander, but we do hope to make it to Seattle soon for Crosscut readers!
Here are some rough edits of pieces from the sold-out show at the Aladdin last week. Many more videos to come! Thanks again to everyone who helped us to sell out the venue again and just make the evening so much fun!
Stephanie Schneiderman and Keith Shreiner with an octet doing “Stone China”:
Here’s The Builders and The Butchers with When It Rains:
And here’s Weinland, La Lamentor, with a nonet of celli:
