(Photo by Steve Singer)
Primary Scene: Brooklyn/New York
Dan Peck was born and raised in New Jersey, where he had a musical upbringing steeped mostly in garage bands and fusion. Later, he turned to studies in classical tuba and developed his interest in the avant-garde and free improvisation.
Since his move to New York in 2005, Dan has cooperatively started multiple groups that focus on various forms of spontaneous composition. His longstanding doom-jazz trio The Gate (with Tom Blancarte on bass and Brian Osborne on percussion), notable for it’s focus on low-register “sludgethetics”, has released 5 albums and completed 3 international tours. Dan Sorrells of the Free Jazz Blog says of their 2014 LP, Stench, “[the album] embodies a strain of aural nihilism that most metal bands should be jealous of.”
Other current projects include Earth Tongues (with Joe Moffett and Carlo Costa), Premature Burial (with Peter Evans and Matt Nelson), Ingrid Laubrock‘s Ubatuba (with Tim Berne, Ben Gerstein, and Tom Rainey), and Blood of the Stars (with Erica Dicker, violin).
He has also collaborated on multiple projects with Anthony Braxton, most recently in the premiere of Braxton’s Double Harp Quintet in Wroclaw, Poland at the JazztoPad Festival in November 2015.
Dan also keeps one foot in the history door, playing with his Manhattan School friends in the period repertoire group Grandpa Musselman and His Syncopators, an old-timey jazz ensemble playing hits from the early 20th century.
Other interests include playing in some of New York’s leading contemporary music ensembles; as a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Dan has played in premieres of works by Alvin Lucier, as well as Helmut Lachenmann (Signal Ensemble) and Georg Friedrich Haas (Talea Ensemble). He resides in Brooklyn with his wife and artistic advisor, Erica Dicker. Dan is is an adjunct faculty member at New Jersey City University.
Peck, Dan