Wednesday 2 September 2026, 7.30pm
John Edwards / double bass
Mike Gennaro / drums, percussion
Alex Ward / clarinet & guitar
Veryan Weston / piano
While Edwards and Ward have made countless appearances at Oto, this will be the trio's debut here. They will be joined by legendary UK pianist Veryan Weston for the second set.
The trio of Toronto-based drummer Mike Gennaro and UK improvisers John Edwards and Alex Ward first played together in 2023, in a meeting subsequently released as their debut cd “ACTIVITY” (Copepod Records). Following this release, the trio embarked on two tours in 2025 with concerts in Germany, Poland and the UK. Live recordings from these performances are featured on the newly released "25 LIVES" on Silver Set Records.
"These three musicians don’t need any warm-up time on Activity. From a standing start, they organize an intense, lively, back-and-forth, sometimes pulsating interaction that makes use of some structural forms such as culminations and retardations, but they unfold and shape them in free communication to the exclusion of common formulas, conventions and stereotypes. The fascination of their instrumental conversation stems primarily from their openness: No melody, no meter dictates the direction here - the discourse develops freely. The wordless, direct rhetoric of this conversation, as unbound as it is coherent, also bears witness to a lightning-like grasp and extraordinary intimacy." - Martin Schray, Free Jazz Blog
John Edwards is a true virtuoso whose staggering range of techniques and boundless musical imagination have redefined the possibility of the double bass and dramatically expanded its role, whether playing solo or with others. 
Perpetually in demand, he has played with Evan Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Sunny Murray, Derek Bailey, Joe McPhee, Lol Coxhill, Louis Moholo, Peter Brötzmann, Mulatu Astatke, Jonny Greenwood and countless others.
"I think John Edwards is absolutely remarkable: there’s never been anything like him before, anywhere in jazz." - Richard Williams, The Blue Moment
Drummer Mike Gennaro burst into improvised music circles in 1999 with the release Port Huron Picnic (Spool), a disc with lauded Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. Then still in his early twenties, Gennaro also made two appearances at the Toronto Jazz Festival, duetting with trailblazing saxophonist John Butcher. Subsequent concert collaborations have included internationally acclaimed improvisers such as Juini Booth, Wilbert de Joode, Veryan Weston, Trevor Watts and Tobi Delius.
In 2022 a short German tour saw him performing in duo settings with Eric Boeren, Frank Gratkowski, and Matthias Schubert. Later that year, a week of recording sessions in Berlin produced the newly released INITIALS with Brad Henkel on trumpet and a trio recording with bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall and bassist Ben Lehmann entitled SECOND TAKE.
Alex Ward's diverse musical activities since the early '90s have straddled the worlds of free improvisation, contemporary composition and avant rock, and have seen him work with such significant musical figures as Derek Bailey, Duck Baker, Lol Coxhill, Eugene Chadbourne, Simon H. Fell, Thurston Moore, Joe Morris, Steve Noble, Evan Parker, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Pat Thomas and Weasel Walter, amongst a host of others. His work as a composer/bandleader has encompassed his own ensembles such as Predicate, Forebrace, the Alex Ward Quintet and Items 4, 6, 7 & 10, alongside collaborative projects such as his duos with Dominic Lash, Jem Doulton (as Dead Days Beyond Help) and Sean Noonan (as Noonward); while his solo releases have ranged from unaccompanied performances on clarinet and guitar to the layered studio creations found on 2021's Gated. He currently plays guitar and sings in math/noise trio Heckle Chamber (with Roberto Sassi and Jem Doulton), and is working on the completion of the final album by legendary band Pere Ubu (which he joined in 2021) alongside the other surviving members.
"...guitarist Alex Ward [is] a compulsively creative polymath... a reliably unpredictable axe-hero for collaborators of all backgrounds." – Stewart Lee, The Sunday Times Review
Veryan Weston (born 1950) was awarded ‘Young Jazz Musician of 1979’ by GLAA. In the '80s, Veryan worked internationally with Lol Coxhill (with whom he made his first recordings – Ogun 525 and Random Radar), the Eddie Prévost Quartet. At this time, he also first met Trevor working in his band Moiré Music which used a unique combination of African rhythmic structures with the European musical tradition (Arc 02).
In the '90s, collaborations with Phil Minton whom he met through Trevor's Moiré Music included the Ways duos, Songs from a Prison Diary awarded the Cornelius Cardew composition prize, a quartet performing extracts from Joyce’s Finnegans wake (with Phil, John Butcher and Roger Turner), and 4Walls with Luc Ex and Michael Vatcher. And most recently - Ways for an Orchestra commissioned by the Angelica Festival (Bologna, Italy - 2017)
Collaborations with Jon Rose on the ‘Temperament Project’ use improvisation with different acoustic keyboards and violins with selected tunings derived from science, history and the imagination. Most recent project has included Hannah Marshall with the Tuning Out Tour (EMANEM double 4141). A trio project with John Edwards and Mark Sanders (EMANEM 4028, 4214, and 4205), the Trio of Uncertainty with cellist Hannah Marshall and violinist Satoko Fukuda (EMANEM 4141), Luc Ex in Sol6 (Red Note 15) which included saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and Hannah Marshall in a trio called Haste. (EMANEM 5025).
‘Tessellations’ is an ongoing composition project based around research on pentatonic scales and has produced: 1. Tessellations for piano (EMANEM 4095), 2 a commissioned piece for Austrian singers - the Vociferous Choir (EMANEM 5015), 3 a string quartet, and 4 'The Make Project' – a Toronto-based project commissioned by Canadian Arts (Released – January 2018). An extension of these ideas has been with Hannah Marshall and Mark Sanders. Supported by ACE to produce a CD project now released on Hi4Head called 'Crossings'.
