About

James Moore is a versatile guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he has been active in New York since 2006, earning the titles of "local electric guitar hero" by Time Out New York and "model new music citizen" by the New York Times. Performing on a wide array of guitars, banjos, mandolins and home-made instruments, James incorporates his classical training and a healthy dose of improvisation, theatrics, and experimentation.

You may have found James in a variety of performance situations: at the Ghent Jazz Festival performing John Zorn's Book of Heads for solo guitar; at the Pompidou Center in Paris as an on-stage musician and actor for playwright Richard Maxwell's Neutral Hero; at the Brooklyn Academy of Music playing the music George Crumb on mandolin and singing saw with soprano Dawn Upshaw; at the Fringe Theater in Hong Kong presenting apocalyptic multimedia works with his guitar quartet Dither; At the Kennedy Center in Washington DC performing David Lang's electrified music for Susan Marshall's dance piece Play/Pause; at the Barbican Center in London playing the music of Michael Gordon with Alarm Will Sound; at the Whitney Museum interpreting graffiti compositions by Christian Marclay with Elliott Sharp; at The World Financial Center strumming a ukulele with the pop/chamber group Clogs; at the Kitchen playing with members of Wilco and The National.

James is a founding member and director of Dither, a raucous electric guitar quartet that is gaining international recognition for precision playing and creative programming. Other projects include The Hands Free, an acoustic quartet; Forever House, a rock band; Florent Ghys's low string quintet Bonjour; Corey Dargel's elegant song cycle Hold Yourself Together; and a duo with violinist Andie Tanning Springer. James's first solo recording (Zorn's Book of Heads) will be released on Tzadik in 2015. He can also be heard on releases for Touch, Bridge, Henceforth, New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records.

James received his Master of Music in guitar performance from the Yale School of Music and his Bachelor of Arts in guitar performance and electronic music from The University of California, Santa Cruz. He has served on the faculty of Princeton University, and he has been a guest artist at universities across the country. His essay on the manuscripts of of Cage/Cowell/Harrison/Thomson's collaboratively written Sonorous or Exquisite Corpses was recently published in Arcana: Musicians on Music.

www.jamesmooreguitar.com

Past groupmuses (1)