“Wodrascka is indeed a clever analyst of the possibilities of her instrument. She delivers clearly decipherable outbreaks and tolerable incongruities, silver-tongued figurations that could be defined as a Cecil Taylor/Irene Schweizer hybrid, still maintaining a critical uniqueness. Once the insides of the piano are deemed useful for certain peculiar illustrations, the task is performed by leaving abundant space around the nutritive aural substance leaking from an attentive arrangement of scraped, plucked and hammered elucidations.” - Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes

French pianist Christine Wodrascka makes a welcome return to Cafe Oto for two nights in the company of bassist Guillaume Viltard and a selection of the UK's finest improvisers. While Wodrascka's playing has a spikiness and speed to it that invites comparisons with American free-jazz players, there's another sensibility at work here as well, more European and abstract, which makes for a compelling combination of attack and restraint. Repetition plays an important part in Wodracka's work, and she's more comfortable than most improvisers in using it to build up sustained musical structures, a quality that makes the prospect of an encounter with Evan Parker particularly interesting. Over the years she's worked with Fred Frith, Joelle Leandre, Fred Van Hove, Paul Lovens, Sophie Agnel, Xavier Charles and Gerry Hemingway as well as participating in memorable sessions with Tony Marsh, Eddie Prevost and John Butcher on recent visits to London.

“As organized as it sounds, Wodrascka's use of arpeggios and scales is clearly unorthodox and actually deconstructs their importance in the vertical musical hierarchy. Harmony is created by what happens in spite of them, not because of them. Also, the emotional depth in her playing is over the top: Each incident of everyday life is ascribed with a musical color or texture; all minutiae contain traces and shapes of emotional -- not merely musical -- discourse. . . . This is 'difficult music'; it is poetic and therefore abstract by its very nature, and it demands to be listened to honestly, with an open heart and mind.” - Thom Jurek, All Music

À l'improviste - Concert - Solo Christine... by francemusique

GUILLAUME VILTARD / double bass

Born in 1975 in the North of Ivory Coast, Viltard grew up in the wild countryside with almost no music. Back in France, he played with many artists of the French underground improv scene, including dancers and poets as well as musicians.

After moving to London in late 2007, Viltard has worked with many of London’s best improvisers, forming strong associations with the circle of musicians centred on Eddie Prevost's experimental workshop, becoming a mainstay of the London Improvisers Orchestra, and playing in a great free jazz trio with Tony Marsh and Shabaka Hutchings that was sadly curtailed by Marsh's untimely death.

It is this eclectic appetite for collaboration across the whole spectrum of improvised music as well as his resolutely unamplified and powerfully physical playing that marks Viltard out as one of the most interesting musicians to emerge from London's fertile improvised and experimental scene in the last few years.

Guillaume Viltard website



EVAN PARKER / saxophones

"ln The Human Province, Elias Canetti writes "lt is not enough to think, one also has to breathe. Dangerous are the thinkers who have not breathed enough." In Evan Parker's music, thought and breath are continuous, each the instrument and measure of the other." Stuart Broomer, Coda 1995

Evan Parker has been a consistently innovative presence in British free music since the 1960s. Parker played with John Stevens in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, experimenting with new kinds of group improvisation and held a long-standing partnership with guitarist Derek Bailey. The two formed the Music Improvisation Company and later Incus Records. He also has tight associations with European free improvisations - playing on Peter Brötzmann's legendary 'Machine Gun' session (1968), with Alexander Von Schlippenbach and Paul Lovens (A trio that continues to this day), Globe Unity Orchestra, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, and Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO).

Though he has worked extensively in both large and small ensembles, Parker is perhaps best known for his solo soprano saxophone music, a singular body of work that in recent years has centred around his continuing exploration of techniques such as circular breathing, split tonguing, overblowing, multiphonics and cross-pattern fingering. These are technical devices, yet Parker's use of them is, he says, less analytical than intuitive; he has likened performing his solo work to entering a kind of trance-state. The resulting music is certainly hypnotic, an uninterrupted flow of snaky, densely-textured sound that Parker has described as "the illusion of polyphony". Many listeners have indeed found it hard to credit that one man can create such intricate, complex music in real time.

SHABAKA HUTCHINGS / saxophones

Shabaka Hutchings plays tenor sax,bass clarinet, clarinet. Described by the BBC as "one of the most eclectic and musically adventurous instrumentalists on the London jazz scene", Hutchings grew up in Barbados and studied clarinet at the Guildhall School of Music. One of the capitals busiest saxophonists he straddles both the avant garde and jazz orthodoxy leading the trio ZED-U and performing with Jazz Warriors, The London Improvisors Orchestra, The Heights, Louis Moholo, Charlie Hadens Liberation Orchestra, Jack DeJohnette All Stars, as well as Speech Debelle, Gary Crosbys Nu Troop and Red Snapper.

In September 2010 Hutchings was confirmed as a 'BBC New Generation Artist'.

'Shabaka is a veritable cauldron of creativity ... an emerging Brit-jazz star if ever there was one' Jazzwise

MARK SANDERS / drums

Mark Sanders has been acclaimed as "the most exciting, original and overwhelmingly powerful drummer alive" (Steve Reynolds, Jazz Corner) and his precise and propulsive drumming has graced projects with, to name but a few, Evan Parker, Jah Wobble, Broadcast, Agusti Fernandez, John Butcher, Roswell Rudd, and Otomo Yoshihde.

"ubiquitous, diverse and constantly creative, drummer Mark Sanders always outdoes himself, whether playing with restraint or erupting like a dynamo." Bruce L Gallenter, Downtown Music Gallery. NY