Pete Townshend Joins Terry Riley Tribute At Long Play Fest

The Who’s Pete Townshend is among the artists participating in a 90th birthday tribute to experimental music legend Terry Riley as part of the fourth Long Play festival curated by Bang on a Can, The event will take place May 2-4 at a variety of Brooklyn, N.Y., venues such as Brooklyn Academy of Music, Pioneer Works and Public Records.

Townshend will play the original “free fall solo version” of his Riley-inspired Who classic “Baba O’Riley” and will also lend a hand during a guest-filled performance of Riley’s iconic piece In C. Meanwhile, Bang on a Can All-Stars will premiere a new take on the musician’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, arranged by Riley’s son Gyan.

As SPIN wrote in 2012, “in the holy trinity of Namechecked Minimalist Composers, Terry Riley has always played the west-coast hippie to Philip Glass’ and Steve Reich’s east-coast urbanites. Combining Indian raga with tape loops, transcendental drone and early electronics, Riley’s music is precise and geometric, but always feels handmade — at one point he hooked a vacuum cleaner motor up to the bellows of an organ so the sound would never stop.”

“I think Terry’s work was funadmental. It was the vertebrae of it all. When I did my first minimalist piece, it was obviously very, very inspired by Terry,” Townshend has said of “Baba O’Riley,” which was named both for Riley and the Indian spiritual guru Meher Baba.

Long Play will also boast the world premiere of Henry Threadgill’s Listen Ship plus performances by Max Richter, Tim Hecker, Ensemble Signal, Nico Muhly, Mary Halvorson and Bill Frisell, Buke and Gase, Fred Frith, Rachel’s principal Rachel Grimes, the Rhythm Method and Valentina Magaletti, among many others.

“Now more than ever, we need music that can reach out to us [and] bring us all together — audacious, courageous music that brings light into the world,” the members of Bang on a Can said of the Long Play lineup.

Click here for ticket details, and see the full lineup below.

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