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Saturday, June 08, 2002

By Nate Guidry, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Ben Opie is a difficult musician to pin down. Just when you think you have him cornered, he emerges with something new and musically more exciting.

	OPEK WHERE: Point State Park Stage. WHEN: 4 p.m. today ARTIST'S SITE: www.fyi.net/~benopie

The co-leader of the now defunct Water Shed 5tet, he can be found performing in Cloud Chamber with Daryl Fleming, Lindsey Horton and Jim Dispirito. He also leads D-Cipher, a trio with Dave Throckmorton and Horton.

But at 4 p.m. today on the Point State Park Stage at the Three Rivers Arts Festival, Opie will be leading OPEK, a 15-member band that was formed in 1999. Most of the music focuses on the obscure works of Sun Ra, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. But Opie has also started to write some original works.

"I think people are put off by the more outrageous elements of Sun Ra's group," he said. "They talked about space and the strange clothes, but inside all of that is a body of compositions that are very deep. His work is very challenging. It's not something you just sit down to groove with."

Opie said he was drawn to Sun Ra's music because of its unpredictability.

"The performances on any given piece can take some unpredictable turns because it's not all written down," said Opie. "If you listen to Sun Ra recordings, they are very much in the moment. There are the arrangements which are written and there's what the bands does with it onstage.

"I think we are getting a stronger sense of where we can play around with material. It's looser than a normal big band situation, which is very charted out."