Saturday 28 April 2018, 7.30pm
Please note that John Edwards has unfortunately had to pull out of this performance but will be replaced by Otto Fischer and Shabaka Hutchings instead.
“I am a long standing fan of Gerry Hemingway’s work, having first encountered him in the Braxton quartet alongside Marilyn Crispell and Mark Dresser. Yet despite having listened to him for many years, we have played together on only one occasion - for the recording of Roberto Ottaviano’s ‘Sideralis’ album, in a quartet completed by Michael Formanek. However, this one occasion was a genuine thrill, and since this time I have been keen to engineer an opportunity for us to perform in public.” – Alexander Hawkins
Alexander Hawkins’ work ranges from his acclaimed solo performances (‘intensely intricate…powerful, technically brilliant and melodically inventive’) through to works on a much larger canvas, such as his Togetherness Music ('[a] masterpiece that can stand next to the best works of Mitchell, Braxton or Parker’). He collaborates regularly with all generations of creative musicians, including the likes of Anthony Braxton, Marshall Allen, Evan Parker, John Surman, Joe McPhee, Hamid Drake, Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, Sofia Jernberg, Shabaka Hutchings, and many others. Further creative associations, with two very different icons of African music, Louis Moholo-Moholo and Mulatu Astatke, stretch back for well over a decade. He has been widely commissioned as a composer, including by the likes of the BBC, Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, and numerous festivals. His performance schedule takes him to club, concert hall, and festival stages worldwide.
"Sounds like all the future jazz you might imagine without ever being able to conceive of the details" – The Guardian
Gerry Hemingway, Composer/Percussionist/Visual Artist/Educator, has been at the forefront of creative music for four decades. He was born in 1955 in New Haven, Conn., to a family with musical interests (his grandmother had been a concert pianist and his father studied composition with Paul Hindemith). He became interested in drums around the age of ten and by the age of seventeen was working as a professional musician primarily in the jazz and bebop traditions. In the 1970's, New Haven was home for a number of interesting musicians. This was where Gerry met and first played with Anthony Davis, Leo Smith, George Lewis and Anthony Braxton. In the late 1970's, Hemingway, trombonist Ray Anderson, and bassist Mark Helias formed a collective trio which they eventually named BassDrumBone. The trio was awarded a grant from Chamber Music America on the occasion of their 30th anniversary in 2007 to compose a new set of works reflecting their then 30 year collaboration. These compositions appear on a release on the Clean Feed label entitled the "The Other Parade"... [more]
Shabaka is a multi-instrumentalist and composer who came to prominence within the London scene playing bands Sons of Kemet, the Comet is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors. At the start of 2024, he announced a hiatus from the saxophone, and since then has been composing material for the various flutes he is engaged in studying. Collaboration and the idea of developmental change being central to artistic practice is the driving force behind Shabaka’s live sets, which are constantly evolving and striving to reflect an up-to-date account of a creative mind in flow.
