Patrick Flanagan
PopTech 2010
The one-man band Jazari consists of machines that play the djembe drum, the bongos, and a variety of hand percussion instruments, all under the control Patrick Flanagan, who wields a custom-built controller and a Wii Remote to improvise through his mechanical band-mates. Jazari has played between punk bands at outdoor rock festivals and in darkened, reverent art spaces. No humans have been hurt or made obsolete.
Prior to working on Jazari, Flanagan earned a master’s in music composition at the University of Minnesota, where he studied primarily with Dr. Noel Zahler. As an undergraduate, he studied composition at Columbia University, where he encountered numerous luminaries of new music and music theory, including Fred Lerdahl, Tristan Murail, Joseph Dubiel, and John McGuire. After college, a Fulbright scholarship brought Flanagan to Germany to study composition at the Musikhochschule in Cologne, where he took classes with two brilliant composers of the Feedback Studio, Clarence Barlow and the late Johannes Fritsch.