Tom Blancarte
In his twenty-year career, Texan bassist Tom Blancarte has cultivated a demented and visceral instrumental practice that transcends the experimental bass canon and pushes improvisatory art to new extremes. As a member of various experimental music groups as well as as a solo performer, he has toured extensively throughout Europe, Japan, and North America, playing venues that range from dingy squatted basements to international festivals.
For over a decade, Texan bassist Tom Blancarte was a key contributor to New York’s creative music scene, both as a freelance performer and as a member of bands such as the electro-acoustic jazz ensemble the Peter Evans Ensemble, the banjo-shred power trio Seabrook Power Plant, New Timbralist free jazz noise trio Totem, an eerie post-apocalyptic duo with wife Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen (The Home of Easy Credit), improv doom tuba trio The Gate and Danish post-punk improv quartet Sweet Banditry.
Today, he lives and works in Denmark, where he became reacquainted with the euphonium (his first instrument), as well as starting the Denmark-based record label Marsken Records. He continues to tour internationally with a variety of groups, including the Copenhagen-based quartet Tactical Maybe and the New York-based quartet Ephemeris, as well as in ad hoc formations. He also works as an educator and researcher, teaching at various conservatories in Denmark and as a part-time lecturer at Aalborg University. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in jazz performance from the University of North Texas and an Advanced Postgraduate Diploma in performance from the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen.
He lives in Toftlund with his wife and two daughters.
Contact via email at tblancarte [at] gmail [dot] com
PRESS QUOTES
"... a man on a mission, equipped with an amplified upright bass designed to bulldoze any obstacles in its path... Blancarte is in interstellar overdrive, abusing the strings with bow in hand, his bass bleeding a deafening soundworld of shrieks and caterwauls, conjuring terrifying images of John Cale’s viola in The Velvet Underground... a relentless spelunking into a sonically mangled abyss."
-Brad Cohan, The New York City Jazz Record
"Blancarte is a man pounding strings, slapping the neck of his instrument, crawling between the thick strings with sticks, the bow producing drones that make the ears tremble with joy. He is an improvising proletarian hero, a man who does not seem thoughtful and puzzled while playing, but rather a working man who enthusiastically performs hard labor. Sweat, effort, hard work, these are the elements of his expression, and we salute them."
- Cvece Zla I Naokapog (Belgrade, Serbia)
"Cultivated tough man Blancarte... at times appearing a little obsessional in brutally hammering the mechanics of retention via substantial patterns and unsettling grumbles, snapping the bass strings with impressive forcefulness but still able to enthrall thanks to a sensible arco extracting celestial upper partials from nowhere."
- Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
"...Blancarte moves to areas beyond himself, the bass and music, where new ideas emerge... as a listener, you are at first astonished, follow along, then drop out but finally can't help but listen."
- Niels Overgård, Jazznyt
"Blancarte scribbles a continuous line of amplified upright bass without ever taking his pen from the metaphoric paper, a twisting, turning stream... that leaves the listener to pick a path through it... small gritty sounds are scraped, twisted and plucked from Blancarte's bass, with frequent sudden leaps from the minuscule to flamboyant. "
- the Wire
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