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Wednesday 11 August 2021, 7.30pm

ALEX WARD SOLO & ITEM 4 (AW/CHARLOTTE KEEFFE/OTTO WILLBERG/ANDREW LISLE)

No Longer Available
Drawing on his compositions from the last four years, Alex Ward will play a set of solo guitar followed by a performance with his quartet Item 4. The debut album by Item 4, "Where We Were", was released by the New York-based label Relative Pitch on March 23rd 2020 (the day the UK entered its first Covid-19 lockdown) simultaneously with Alex's first solo guitar album "Frames". The follow-up to "Frames", entitled "The Trade", was conceived and recorded over the first two months of that lockdown and released by Cafe Oto's Takuroku label in May 2021. The music played both by Alex solo and by Item 4 integrates distinctive, often highly emotive composed material into an open-ended improvisational landscape giving full rein to the performers' individual languages and expressivity.
Alex Ward / clarinet, guitar and compositions
Charlotte Keeffe / trumpet and flugelhorn
Otto Willberg / double bass
Andrew Lisle / drums

Alex Ward

Alex Ward is a composer, improviser, and performing musician, working primarily with clarinet and guitar. His involvement in freely improvised music dates back to 1986, when he met the guitarist Derek Bailey. He subsequently took part regularly in Bailey's Company events, and has gone on to become a major figure in British improvised music. 
His current work includes the avant-rock duo Dead Days Beyond Help in which he plays guitar, sings and co-writes the material; various groups which perform his compositions-for-improvisers including Forebrace, the Alex Ward Quintet/Sextet, and the Item series of ensembles (the first of which, Item 10, debuted at Cafe Oto in September 2017); and improvising collaborations both regular and ad-hoc with musicians including Steve Noble, Dominic Lash, Kay Grant, Joe Morris and Weasel Walter. Besides his own groups and improvisational work, he also performs in ensembles including the Duck Baker Trio/Quartet, Thurston Moore’s recent multi-guitar projects Galaxies and New Noise Guitar Explorations, and Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward’s This Is Not This Heat. He brings a unique energy and inventiveness to all these projects, elevating them far above the ordinary and injecting them with a thrilling sense of danger and possibility. Much of his work is documented on the label Copepod, which he co-runs with Luke Barlow.
 
"...guitarist Alex Ward [is] a compulsively creative polymath... a reliably unpredictable axe-hero for collaborators of all backgrounds." Stewart Lee, The Sunday Times Review

Charlotte Keeffe

Trumpeter/Flugelhorn player Charlotte Keeffe plays regularly in the London Improvisers Orchestra and and has shared Concert bills/performed alongside the likes of John Edwards, Henry Lowther, Steve Noble, John Butcher, Steve Beresford and Mark Sanders.  Charlotte performs as a Soloist and as part of her Trio, Space Painters, with Guitarists - Joe Smith Sands and Diego Sampieri. She has a Duo with Trumpeter Kim Macari Stone-Lonergan and is part of Discus Music’s Martin Archer's Hi-Res Art Quintet and Anthropology Ensemble. eature Martin Archer on sax, Dave Kane on bass, Laura Cole on piano, Graham Clark on violin and Peter Fairclough on drums, Corey Mwamba on vibraphone, Chris Sharkey on guitar and Pat Thomas on keys and electronics. She has assisted Guitarist John Russell with establishing the Mopomoso Workshop Group/MoWo.

www.charlottekeeffe.com 
www.soundcloud.com/charlottekeeffe

Otto Willberg

Otto Willberg is a improvisor who lives in London and plays the Double Bass and Bass Guitar. Otto currently plays with include Ashley Pauls trio (ray), Yes Indeed (with Laurie Tompkins), and the band - Historically Fucked. Otto maintains a website called www.bootlegspatialrecall.net which is an open/publicly sourced archive of public space reverbs. He also has a solo recording ‘Barbaric Mystical Bored’ which is released on Why Eye. www.ottowillberg.com

Andrew Lisle

Andrew Lisle is a drummer based in London. During a period of two years living and playing in Lisbon, Portugal he spent much of his time at the Clean Feed Records' base of operations Trem Azul. Here he was able to develop his playing and collaborate with some of the city's veteran improvisers including Rodrigo Pinheiro (Red Trio), Hernani Faustino (Red Trio) and Rodrigo Amado among others. Since moving to London in 2013 his powerfully dynamic playing has established him as a sought-after drummer on the improvised music scene, performing and recording with some of the most innovative musicians in the UK and Europe. These include John Edwards, Seymour Wright, Alex Ward, Simon Rose, Alan Wilkinson, Kier Neuringer, Matthew Bourne, Dominic Lash, Rachel Musson and Mark Sanders. On-going projects to date include Kodian trio, Colin Webster/Andrew Lisle, Roland Ramanan 10-tet and Rose/Thompson/Lisle to name a few.
http://www.andrewlisle.com/

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