Thomas Carabasi: Sarasota’s Renaissance Man

Thomas Carabasi

Thomas Carabasi is currently the Department Head of the Photography and Digital Imaging Department at The Ringling College of Art and design. This Philadelphia native is also an active percussionist and bandleader on the Sarasota scene.

If you haven’t seen his breathtaking large format photographs then you have a treat coming up. His photography will be exhibited at Allyn Gallup Contemporary Art located at 1419-B 5th Street in Sarasota in February. The show is titled “Urban/Tropical” and opens Friday, February 5th with a reception from 6-8 PM. The show will run until February 27th and feature detailed landscapes from Bali and collaged urban street scenes from Europe and the United States. Call (941) 366-2093 or check the gallery’s website for details about the show www.allyngallup.com or check Carabasi’s website at www.thomascarabasi.com

Thomas Carabasi’s photography has won him grants from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts and the Australian Council of the Arts. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including shows in Australia, Germany and Italy. It has also been published in Popular Photography, Zoom Magazine, Mirabella, View Camera, The London Independent and Nerve Magazine. In 1994 he was a featured artist in the Florida Artists show at The Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. Carabasi has work in the collections of the Ringling Museum of Art, The Center for Creative Photography in Tuscon, Arizona, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Museo Ken Damy in Brescia, Italy. This talented artist has also published a monograph of his work entitled “Traces,” with photographs and poetry from 1979-1989.

Carabasi’s musical journeys have included performances and recordings with many of the areas top jazz artists including Manfredo Fest, Kenny Drew Jr., Nathen Page, John Lamb, Dick Reynolds, Jeff Berlin, Michael Royal, Richie Zellon, Kenny Soderblum, Patrick Bettison, Dianne Linscott, Richard Drexler and the Michael Ross Quartet. During the last several years he has also done guest performances with the Florida Orchestra (with Manfredo Fest), the Clayton Brothers, David Amram, Ted Rosenthal, Stefon Harris, Bob Berg, Rick DeLarotta, David “Fathead” Newman and John LaPorta.

In 2001 he arranged and produced a CD entitled “Portraits in Black and White” with an assortment of Brazilian and jazz standards featuring Kenny Drew Jr. on piano. The recording was voted one of that year’s top new CD’s by WUSF jazz radio of Tampa.

Carabasi formed his own band called The Samba Jazz Quartet five years ago and has been performing this beautiful mixture of jazz and Brazilian music regularly in the Sarasota and Tampa Bay area. This band was featured in a one and a half-hour live performance for Tampa public television and his group also performed for several of Sarasota Jazz Festival events.  Carabasi has traveled to Brazil to study firsthand the harmonies of bossa-nova and the rhythms of samba and “olodum.” His latest group is called the World Fusion Project and includes Larue Nicholson on guitar, Jeremy Powell on saxophone and Joe Porter on bass. The group will be performing compositions with a mixture of jazz, Middle Eastern, African and Latin influences at their engagement called Jazz Celebration on Wednesday, February 17th at the Longboat Key Education Center from 3-4:30 PM. Tickets are $20. Call 941-383-8811.

I had the pleasure to interview Thomas Carabasi recently. Here are some questions I asked and Carabasi’s answers.

Have you seen a change in the live jazz scene in Sarasota over the years? Is the scene waxing or waning? What about in other cities?

I think the economic climate has perhaps limited the restaurants and clubs from hiring musicians. The steady gigs are drying up somewhat. But self-recording and different forms of performances like house concerts are new opportunities that are opening up. The noise ordinances have always been an issue here.  New York is still the hub of jazz activity and Chicago has a strong scene. I was in Antwerp, Belgium recently and there was very lively music scene with younger musicians who were also students studying jazz at the conservatories.

What drew you to Brazilian rhythms?

The first exposure I had to really great Brazilian jazz was a collaboration called Native Dancer with Wayne Shorter and Brazilian superstar Milton Nascimento. It’s an incredible CD and I got hooked on Brazilian music. Then I branched out and started listening to Gilberto Gill, and Caetano Veloso. What really helped me was playing with the late Manfredo Fest in Sarasota We played every weekend when Fandango on Siesta Key was one of the premier outlets for jazz. Unfortunately, Fandango has been gone for several years.

I know what samba is but what is Olodum that you refer to when you speak about the Brazilian rhythms that you play?

Olodum refers to a rhythm but mostly to a cultural institution or group based in the Afro Brazilian community of Salvador, the capital city of the state of Bahia, Brazil. It was founded by percussionist, Neguinho do Samba. Olodum performed on Paul Simon’s album The Rhythm of the Saints and at the subsequent concert in Central Park, New York City on August 15, 1991.  It’s a politicized drum troupe. It’s all about carrying on African traditions and rhythms. Fundamentally they are making political statements through their drumming. Olodum tries to reconnect to its African roots.

Now, I’d like to ask you a few questions about your photography exhibit. Why did you choose to focus on urban street scenes in your collages?

I was intrigued by what the visual culture looks like now in densely populated cities such as Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, and Times Square in New York.  There are about seven pieces in the show from what I call my cultural collision series. In each I picked two cities and contrasted them—like a Tale of Two Cities.  The natural landscapes of  Bali are juxtaposed with  these urban landscapes in my show, hence the title “Urban/Tropical.”

What are some of the contemporary issues in photography?

I teach a whole course on that!  Photography has been revolutionized by technology. But what you end up with is more important than what you use to create the photograph. Whether digital photography is art or not is a debate that is long over. Digital photography is a powerful medium.   The questions to ask are: Does it have longevity? Does it have impact? Are people interested in it and do they learn something from it? A lot of fine art today is cultural studies. What the photograph is telling us about ourselves is more meaningful than the formal considerations and whether they are beautiful pictures. That has been one of the big shifts in contemporary photography. In one of my collage pieces I combined a monument in Prague that commemorated some of the people that died in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Prague with a Bank of America advertisement in Times Square. Aesthetic concerns and layers of content combined to make a statement about two contrasting systems; communism and capitalism.

Tell us something about your book Traces and the photographs and poetry that inspired it.

I self published Traces. It was a ten-year series of images from 1980-1990. I included my poetry. Linking poetry and images is very powerful. I was greatly influenced at the time by the visionary poet William Blake—his extraordinary paintings and imaginative engravings that he created for his poems The Songs of Innocence and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Don’t miss Thomas Carabasi’s concert and exhibition. Numbers and websites again are:  Allyn Gallup Contemporary Art  (941) 366-2093   www.allyngallup.com Thomas Carabasi www.thomascarabasi.com The Longboat Key Education Center (941) 383-8811  www.lbkeducationcenter.org

Susan Goldfarb is a free-lance writer who has been writing feature articles and columns for more than twenty-five years. She is the executive director of the The Longboat Key Education Center.