Thursday 11 September 2025, 7.30pm
The IMPROVESISTANCE Ensemble emerges from urgency and solidarity. It demands, in sound and music, nothing less than what Palestine demands: the breaking of the siege, an end to starvation, and the pursuit of total freedom and justice.
The ensemble centres electro-acoustic processing of sounds from Palestine - expanded instrumentally and electronically - forging a sonic force that does more than express or protest. It persists, resists, and amplifies in real time. This is not metaphorical. This is sound as a direct act of solidarity, disruption, and insistence.
Dirar Kalash is a Palestinian musician and sound artist whose work spans a wide range of musical and sonic practices within a variety of instrumental, compositional and improvisational contexts. He is mostly known for his politically driven soundscape / electro-acoustic project "The Sonic Front", and the compositions "we can't breathe (for eric garner, george floyd, and frantz fanon)" and "by any means necessary (for Malcolm X)"
Pat Thomas / piano
John Edwards / bass
Kwake Bass / drums
Dirar Kalash / electronics
Shabaka Hutchings / winds
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.
Pat Thomas studied classical piano from aged 8 and started playing Jazz from the age of 16. He has since gone on to develop an utterly unique style - embracing improvisation, jazz and new music. He has played with Derek Bailey in Company Week (1990/91) and in the trio AND (with Noble) – with Tony Oxley’s Quartet and Celebration Orchestra and in Duo with Lol Coxhill.
"Sartorially shabby as Thomas may be, and on first impression even rather stolid, he has a somewhat imperious charisma that’s immediately amplified when he starts to play. Unlike other pianists whose virtuosity seems to be racing ahead of their thought processes Thomas always seems supremely in command of his gift, and his playing, no matter how free and ready to tangle with abstraction, always carries a charge of authoritative exactitude." - The Jazzmann
Kwake Bass is from Lewisham South London. He’s been the musical director for both Sampha and Kae Tempest’s tours and has played with the likes of Lianne La Havas, Mica Levi, Joey Bada$$, MF Doom, Shabaka Hutchings and Novelist. As a producer he explores what lives between the cracks of structured programming with live electronic improvisation.
https://kingkwakebass.bandcamp.com/
Neil Charles is one of the most in-demand musicians on the scene, with a huge array of credits to his name, including Jack DeJohnette, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Mingus Big Band, Jose James, Jerry Dammers, Courtney Pine, and Terence Blanchard. His own projects have included Zed U, with Shabaka Hutchings and Tom Skinner, and the more recent ensemble Dark Days, dealing with the work of James Baldwin. Most recently, he has been heard across the international scene with Gabriels. As well as being known as a bass player with a huge sound and immaculate sense of time, he is equally renowned as a producer, going by the alias Ben Marc.
"Bassist Neil Charles went flying, from the first moment filling the space with the sound of his mighty wings Henning Bolte," – Europe Jazz Media Chart
