Blake A. Newman: Long Bio
Bassist and composer Blake Newman was born in New York City and was drawn to music at an early age. He entertained himself for hours on end by playing piano. When he was 11 his family moved to Florida and soon thereafter he began taking lessons on viola, eventually settling on Double-bass followed by bass guitar soon after. Following highschool he spent a year in San Francisco before moving to Boston to study at Berklee College. He has called the Boston area home ever since.
Blake has always had a flair for the exotic and his musical tastes have been no exception. He's had the good fortune to be able to explore a wide array of musical traditions with some great musicians.
He spent six years performing and recording with West African Mbalax band, Ibrahima Camara and Safal, which culminated with a tour of Senegal in 1997.
He spent four years as a member of MIT’s Balinese gamelan orchestra, Gamelan Galak Tika, performing at New York's Lincoln Center and Winter Garden among other venues. With this group, led by composer/instrumentalist Evan Ziporyn, Blake appears on the CD, "Amok" (2000, New World Records). More recently, as a guest artist with the group, he performed at Carnegie Hall and on a tour of Bali in 2005. In the spring of 2007, Blake played Double bass on Ziporyn’s newest composition for gamelan and string Orchestra, entitled Bayu Sabda Idep.
In 1999 Blake joined the Bruce Katz Band and spent three years anchoring the hard rocking American roots band. A year after joining the band, he recorded “Three Feet off the Ground” (2000, Audioquest), which was met with great international acclaim. During his tenure in the band, Blake performed on multiple U.S. and European tours as well as many blues and Jazz festivals in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Scandinavia.
In 2004, Blake performed in the American Repertory Theater's production of Oedipus, directed by Robert Woodruff with music composed by Evan Ziporyn. He returned to the ART in the spring of 2006 for the production OrpheusX, created by Rinde Eckert and again directed by Wooduff. In August 2007, he traveled to Scotland, where OrpheusX was presented at the International Festival in Edinburgh. In February 2008, Blake travelled with the ART to present OrpheusX at the Hong Kong International Festival of the Arts. Also in 2008, Blake organized and performed in a jazz trio for the ART production of Julius Caesar, directed by Arthur Nauzyciel.
Blake is a founding member of the Jeff Robinson Trio, a music and spoken word group. The band has been hosting a “poetry jam” at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge MA for the past twelve years. They released “Next on the Mic” (2007 Rounder Records), and have performed with poets Amiri Baraka, Patricia Smith, Regie Gibson, Askia Toure and Quincy Troupe among others.
As a composer, Blake’s musical score was featured in the May 2007 theatrical production of Andrea Bredbeck's “As if We Live to Bear No Scars,” presented at the Roxbury Center for the Arts.
As a freelance bassist, Blake has performed and/or recorded with David Murray, Ran Blake, Big Jack Johnson, Duke Robillard, Butch Morris, Joe Beard, Michelle Wilson, John Sinclair, Peter Wolf, David Maxwell, Mamadou Diop, Toni Lynn Washington, and Jon Faddis.
Blake has studied privately with Charlie Bonacas, Dave Holland, Charlie Haden, and Gary Peacock.
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