photo by David Kumin

DAVID BINDMAN, saxophonist, flutist, and composer, creates works that combine many elements: drawing on the motion of dance, exploring complexities of melody and time unbound, and emphasizing improvisation at the core. He has produced two critically acclaimed CDs by his sextet, Sunset Park Polyphony and Ten Billion Versions of Reality. He co-led the Brooklyn Sax Quartet with Fred Ho for a decade, touring the USA and Canada and releasing two recordings, The Way of the Saxophone (innova) and Far Side of Here (Omnitone). As a member of Blood Drum Spirit, he has recorded three CDs, appears in the award-winning film We Are One/Blood Drum Spirit, and has performed around the world. Multi-media collaborations include, with Tyrone Henderson and Quimetta Perle, The Madman and Strawman Dance, and with Malin Abrahamsson, Human Diaspora/The Dream Space Continuum. Along with Stefan Bauer and Micheal Sarin, David is a member of the Relative Motion Trio; the trio released Relative Motion in 2022. David has performed or recorded with Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Kevin Norton, Ehran Elisha, Adam Lane, Frank London, Joe Fonda, and Scott D. Miller, and many others. David seeks to offer artistic alternatives to the profit-driven imperatives that imperil life, deny justice, and go against the human spirit and the natural world—art that stands for global equality, the environment, and human worth.

David began playing violin at five, at ten switched to alto sax, then played drums. Early on, music was all around, from the sounds of Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and John Coltrane to the musicians he saw perform in his hometown of Englewood, NJ, including Dizzy Gillespie. David's formative experiences included his mother's anti-war and social justice activism.

In 1977, living with his grandparents in Vermont, David began playing with fellow high school students, pianist Jim Sugarman and drummer Ben Wittman. Having begun exploring improvisation on his own, David studied briefly with Sigurd Rascher, and then with saxophonist Stephen Horenstein. Introduced to the music community centered around Bennington College, he became part of trumpeter/composer Arthur Brooks' ensemble, and, during his last year in high school, received a scholarship to take a class with trumpeter/composer Bill Dixon.

As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University in the early 1980s, David studied with saxophonist Bill Barron, trombonist Bill Lowe, and others in Wesleyan's World Music Department. He became a member of Talking Drums, led by master drummers Abraham Adzenyah and Freeman Donkor. The group toured the US and released the LP Some Day Catch Some Day Down (Shanachie, 1987, reissued as a CD on Innova in 2011). During this time David was also a member of the collective quartet JUBA, with bassist Wes Brown, drummer royal hartigan, and Bill Lowe, and worked with Wadada Leo Smith's New Dalta Ahkri.

JUBA, photo by Rob Lancefield

Since moving to New York City in 1987, David has been involved with numerous performances, recordings, and collaborations. In the early 1990s he collaborated with poet Tyrone Henderson and visual artist Quimetta Perle on the The Madman, Strawman Dance, and other multi-media works, with performances at P.S. 122, the Nuyorican Poets Café, the Knitting Factory and other venues in New York and New England, and in Manchester, UK. The CD Strawman Dance was released on Konnex in 1994.

David and Tyrone Henderson, early 1990s, photo by Oren Slor

During the 1990s, David led his trio with Kevin Norton and Joe Fonda (Imaginings, CIMP, 1997) and co-founded the Brooklyn Sax Quartet with Fred Ho. The BSQ released two CDs, The Way of the Saxophone (Innova, 2001) and Far Side of Here (Omnitone, 2005). The quartet included, at different times, Sam Furnace, Chris Jonas, John O'Gallager, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Ned Rothernberg, Sam Newsome, and many guest performers. The BSQ toured the western USA and Canada, performed David's arrangement of Hector Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet live on WNYC's Soundcheck with John Schaefer and at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater, and performed often at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAM Café. During this time David appeared on recordings with Fred Ho, Kevin Norton, Ehran Elisha, Joe Fonda, Scott D. Miller, Anthony Braxton, and others. He toured with Fred Ho's Afro-Asian Music Ensemble and Monkey Orchestra, performing at BAM, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, the Atlanta Arts Festival, the Seattle Children's Festival, and the Guggenheim Museum, among other venues.

Blood Drum Spirit giving a workshop at University of Santo Tomas, Manilla, Philippines, 2011

The collaboration between Wes Brown, royal hartigan, and David Bindman, joined in 2003 by pianist Art Hirahara, continues today under hartigan's leadership as Blood Drum Spirit. The quartet released three double CDs, including, most recently, Time Changes in 2019, and conducted numerous educational residencies in the USA and abroad. The group's 2015 collaborations with Ghanaian musicians, dancers, singers, and poets, the histories of the quartet's members, and the connections of jazz with West African music/culture, are the subjects of the award-winning documentary film We Are One, directed by Sara Pettenilla. In 2017, Blood Drum Spirit toured Ghana for a second time, sponsored by the U.S. State Department. This tour included new collaborations, film screenings, discussions, and performances. The group has also performed in China, the Philippines, Trinidad and across the US.

In 2006 David began composing a series of extended suites for sextet. He has since self-released two CDs by the David Bindman Sextet, Sunset Park Polyphony (2012) and Ten Billion Versions of Reality (2017). The group has performed in New York and New England and conducted residencies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

photo by Stephen Horenstein

David's recent collaborations include work with visual artist Malin Abrahamsson on the music/abstract animation Human Diaspora: The Dream Space Continuum, screened at UMass Dartmouth in 2016. In 2018 David performed in Jerusalem with Stephen Horenstein's Lab Orchestera, and, in Tel Aviv, a concert of his sextet compositions, joined by five Israeli musicians. The concert included a reunion duet with Horenstein. In 2019, David began collaborating with drummer Michael Sarin and mallet percussionist Stefan Bauer. The first performance by their Relative Motion Trio took place at ShapeShifter's Lab in Brooklyn in fall 2019.

David was born in 1963 in New York City. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1985 and received an MA in World Music from Wesleyan in 1987. He has received grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Queens Council on the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, Meet The Composer, and The Aaron Copland Fund for Music Performing Ensembles. He has taught in the New York City school system, Bennington College, LaGuardia Community College, and The New School University, and has conducted or assisted in master classes throughout the USA and in Canada. In addition to his work in music, he designs curriculum and teaches union members in NYC  under the auspices of the Consortium for Worker Education.