Hannah Marshall / Ian MacGowan / Stephen Flinn (trio) + John Butcher / Chris Burn / Guillaume Viltard (trio)
No Longer Available
An evening of two trios. The first - Alter Egos are Ian MacGowan - trumpet, Cellist- Hannah Marshall & American drummer Stephen Flinn who play together again after making Watt for Creatives sources in 2012 - their music has been descirbed as having a 'natural, organic cohesiveness' and as 'almost seamless and breath-like progression of events'. The long-standing pairing of John Butcher on saxophone and Chris Burn on piano are joined by double-bassist Guillaume Viltard. This year marks the 30th anniversary of John Butcher's first LP - Fonetiks - a duo alongside Chris Burn. This will be their first performance together in many years - well-timed and not to be missed!
HANNAH MARSHALL / cello
Hannah Marshall is a cellist who is continuing to extract, invent, and exorcize as many sounds and emotional qualities from her instrument as she can. She has been a regular member of Alexander Hawkins’ Ensembles and has toured in Europe and South America with Luc Ex and Veryan Weston’s ensembles – SOL 6 & 12. She plays with ‘String Terrorists’ - Barrel (a trio with Violinist Alison Blunt & Violist/poet Ivor kallin). And has been invited by Fred Frith and Suichi Chino in their residencies at café Oto. She also plays with Terry Day, Tim Hodgkinson, Roger Turner, Paul May, Kay Grant, and the London Improvisers Orchestra.
MacGowan has been playing improvised music since arriving from Dublin in 1990 and has collaborated with Paul Rutherford, John Stevens, Maggie Nichols, Lol Coxhill and Eddie Prévost among others.
He helped to institute the London Improvisers Orchestra in 1998 with Steve Beresford and Evan Parker after the Butch Morris London Skyscraper tour, and also founded The Gathering with Maggie Nichols.
In 2000 he recorded his second CD as a leader, Daybreak, with Derek Bailey, Veryan Weston, Gail Brand and Oren Marshall. Into the twenty-first century, as well as regularly playing with UK and Irish improvisers, he has also performed with Wadada Leo Smith, Greg Tate’s Burnt Sugar Arkestra, guitarists Han-earl Park and Reeves Gabrels, the Poet and Detroit legend John Sinclair, and New York based drummer Harris Eisenstadt. He has recently collaborated with drummer G Calvin Weston and has been featured on a version of John Zorn’s gamepiece Rugby which will be released by Tzadik.
MacGowan’s.. “style has the free-form panache of a Wadada Leo Smith or Joe McPhee, but his experience of other musics is never too far from the surface. Some of his gestures seem to derive from earlier forms of jazz, and there are moments of harmonic directness that you could put chord symbols under. But it has all been thoughtfully moulded into a highly convincing and distinctive language.” - Philip Clark, JazzReview
STEPHEN FLINN
Stephen Flinn is a composer, performer, and improviser who performs throughout Europe, Japan, and the United States. As well as being an accomplished percussionist, he works with unusual sound sources, including self made instruments and found objects. He has performed and recorded with many prominent European and American improvisers. For the last seven years he has been using the drums to teach reading, writing, and social skills to intellectually and physically challenged teens and adults. Stephen is based out of Los Angeles and New York City.
John Butcher was born in Brighton, England and has lived in London since the late 1970s. His music ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and extreme acoustics.
Originally a theoretical physicist, he published his Ph.D in 1982 and then left academia for music. He has since collaborated with hundreds of musicians, mostly involved with improvisation - including Derek Bailey, John Stevens, Polwechsel, Gino Robair, Rhodri Davies, Okkyung Lee, Gerry Hemingway, Toshimaru Nakamura, Eddie Prevost, Paul Lovens, Christian Marclay and Andy Moor.
Compositions include “Penny Wands” for reconstructed Futurist Intonarumori, pieces for the Rova and Quasar saxophone quartets, "somethingtobesaid" for the John Butcher Group and “Tarab Cuts”. In 2011 he was one of three recipients of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Composers.
Alongside long term collaborations he particularly values playing in occasional encounters, which have ranged from large groups such as Butch Morris’ London Skyscraper and the EX Orkestra, to duo concerts with Fred Frith, Otomo Yoshihide, Matthew Shipp, Tony Buck and Akio Suzuki.
Butcher is also well known as a solo saxophonist who attempts to engage with a sense of place. The well received “Resonant Spaces” CD is a collection of site-specific performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.
After University where he gained a B.Mus and M.Mus, Chris Burn worked as a composer, arranger, conductor and pianist in both contemporary dance and jazz. He gained a number of awards for his work and broadcast on local and national radio and television. In the 1970s he had participated in workshops on 'intuitive music' led by Robin Maconie, a one time assistant of Stockhausen but the 1980s saw a transition to free improvisation. Having worked with saxophonist John Butcher for a number of years, the two musicians recorded Fonetiks in late 1984 and toured Britain the following year. Subsequently they teamed up with Australian flautist Jim Denley and cellist Marcio Mattos to form Embers. This quartet has twice toured Europe, once toured Britain and recorded on Acta. Other work with Butcher has included a quartet with Martin Klapper and Jindrich Biskup that played a brief Arts Council sponsored tour of England in early 1996.
In 1984 Chris Burn formed the octet Ensemble, reflecting his interest in organising music for a large number of improvising musicians. In 1990, Ensemble toured Britain and were featured on the SPNM's (Society for the Promotion of New Music) Improvisation Day. More recently they have broadcast for BBC Radio 3 (1992, 1994), for WDR radio and television and performed at a variety of European festivals, including Bochum; Stadtgarten (Köln); Ulrichsberg Kalaidophon; Victoriaville; and Crosswinds (London). An expanded version of Ensemble also exists featuring, in addition to the usual members, Alex Dörner on trumpet; Mark Wastell on cello and Rodri Davies on harp.
As an improvisor, Chris Burn has forged a unique style of piano playing by developing a multitude of alternative techniques, both on the keyboard and inside the instrument. He is also known for his performances of the piano music of Henry Cowell (writing a documentary for BBC Radio 3 about Cowell's music in 1995), John Cage and other contemporary composers, sometimes including compositions and improvisations in the same concert. His notes to his performance at 'An Acta Evening' in London in August 1997 included the statement: "For my performance this evening, I will combine some or all of the pieces listed below, with my own freely improvised music. I have chosen these particular pieces because they demonstrate interesting and innovative uses of the piano." The works included five pieces by Henry Cowell, three by John Cage (Dream, The wonderful widow of eighteen springs, Suite for toy piano), two by George Crumb (Morning music, Rain-death variations), and Six little piano pieces Op 19 by Schoenberg. As an improvising soloist, Burn has performed at many festivals throughout Europe, including Ruhr Valley (Bochum); FMP (Berlin); London Musicians Collective; Loft (Köln). He performed in Derek Bailey's Company in 1990. In 1993 Chris Burn was shortlisted for a Paul Hamlyn award for composers.
GUILLAUME VILTARD / 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.
