Sunday 20 September 2026
Exactly 30 years and 3 months ago Leo Records was promoting a three-day international music festival called Unsung Music. The event was held at the Royal Festival Hall, London. The idea of the festival was to present innovative, improvisation-based music that had never been heard live in Great Britain before.
Spool 30 years forward, and this kind of music is regularly heard in many venues. To celebrate the thirty-year.25 anniversary of this music, Leo Records will present a one day celebration bringing the best practitioners of this genre to Cafe OTO. As part of the celebrations, we'll also be hosting a special matinee screening of the documentary, 'Leo Records : Strictly For Our Friends'.
More than a generation has passed since the astounding singer Sainkho Namtchylak emerged from her homeland in Tuva, deep in Soviet Siberia, by the Mongolian border. She moved to Moscow, where her startling vocal gifts were recognized and featured internationally in the USSR's minority 'showcase' ensembles. Then on to Western Europe, where she became a phenomenon of creative improvised music and part of the genesis of the contemporary World Music scene. She put together various ensembles with young musicians, creating acclaimed productions, including the International music hits "Stepmother City" and "Time Out", plus the album Lost Rivers (FMP) and Letters (Leo Records).
Mia Zabelka (violin, voice) is a sound artist, composer as well as an improviser from Vienna, with czech, jewish and french familiar background. After completing her training with a strong classical emphasis, she continued to construct and explore the limits of sound and music in a language entirely her own, based on the de- and reconstruction of the violin’s sonic possibilities, expanding the range of the instrument using live electronic devices, preparing it through the insertion of alien objects between or on the strings and innovative performance techniques.
Mia Zabelka describes this process as AUTOMATIC PLAYING, continuously exploring sound and music as physical phenomena, always pushing back the boundaries in experimental performances and compositions that question established notions, improving the available techniques and given structures. The violin and her own voice and body are transformed in the process into sound bodies which are at once organic and primal, screaming, lyrical, composed and explosive.
She has collaborated with a string of exciting artists from around the world, such as Robin Rimbaud, Pauline Oliveros, Elliott Sharp, Dälek, Lydia Lunch, Alexei Borisov , Phill Niblock, John Zorn, John Russell, Maggie Nicols and Philippe Petit.
She has given concerts and performances at many Festivals throughout Europe, America and Asia. Numerous CD, vinyl and video releases. Recipient of highly regarded prizes (3-time winner oft the Prix Ars Electronica) and awards, she was a guest of the DAAD’s (German Academic Exchange Service’s) international artists’ programme in Berlin and the Fulbright Commission in New York.
Mia Zabelka is currently the artistic director of Phonofemme Festival Vienna and Klanghaus Untergreith in the region of South Styria.
Simon Nabatov, pianist and composer, was born in Moscow 1959 in a musician's family. He started to play piano at the age of 3 and to compose at 6.
After attending the renowned Central Music School and Moscow Conservatory he landed in 1979 in USA, where he continued his studies at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music in New York, the city in which he spent the next 10 years.
In 1989 he moved to Germany, settling in Cologne where he resides presently. His musical activities include jazz, improvised, experimental and world music.
Nabatov has attained world-wide reputation through his solo concerts as well as numerous long-time collaborations – in duos with Steve Lacy, Nils Wogram, Tom Rainey, Han Bennink, Ernst Reijseger and Matthias Schubert; with the NDR Bigband; in quartets of Ray Anderson, Arthur Blythe and Perry Robinson, among others.
"If you've ever been tempted by free improvisation, Parker is your gateway drug." - Stewart Lee
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.
Carolyn Hume / piano, keyboards
Paul May / drums
Paul May and Carolyn Hume have been playing and recording together for 27 years. They have released 8 critically acclaimed albums on Leo Records.
Hume and May create potent ambient atmospheres, moving from minimalist sci-fi to rhythmic landscapes.
Paul May is one of the most respected drummers on the improvising circuit. His CV includes work with the likes of Alexander Hawkins, Petra Jean Phillipson, Tim Hodgkinson, Klaus Filip and Matthias Eick, as well as electro-acoustic improvisers Sonnamble and the improv trios Elvers (with trumpeter Ian R Watson) and Found Drowned (with guitarist James O'Sullivan). He was also responsible for co-founding the critically acclaimed spiritual jazz collective Woven Entity alongside Lascelle Gordon and Patrick Dawes. May’s longstanding duo with Carolyn Hume has resulted in 8 well received albums on Leo Records and led to the formation of Fourth Page. He’s also worked closely with UK bluesman Duke Garwood for some two decades and features heavily on Garwood’s critically acclaimed recent albums 'Heavy Love’ and 'Garden of Ashes’.
Hume has released 14 albums since 2000 on ‘Leo Records’; 8 collaborations with the drummer, Paul May, 3 collaborative project albums and 3 solo albums featuring compositions for cello and voice.
She has performed Internationally, in Europe and the UK and provided music for short films, including work by Sub Gravity Films, Pan MacMillan and ‘Elegy Japan’ with photographer Darron Davies.
Her collaborations include work with Oliver Coates, Alexey Kruglov, Sonia Hammond, Judie Tzuke, Kuljit Bhamra, Duke Garwood, Oleg Yudanov, Pete Marsh, Charlie Beresford, Russell Webb and John McGeoch.
Mark has worked with many greats of the British, European and American free jazz improvised music scene including Roscoe Mitchell, Roswell Rudd, Evan Parker, John Butcher, Henry Grimes, Elaine Mitchener, Wadada Leo Smith, Myra Melford, Charles Gayle , Sirone and William Parker
He has also played with Jah Wobble, Harold Budd, Bill Laswell, Christian Marclay, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ilan Volkov and The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
He is a member of many working groups including duos with Nicole Mitchell and Rhodri Davies, Neil Charles' 'Dark Days' with Cleveland Watkiss & Pat Thomas, 'Last Dream of the Morning' with John Butcher & John Edwards, 'Shifa' with Rachel Musson and Pat Thomas and 'Sarost' with Larry Stabbins & Paul Rogers.
As an educator he has taught improvisation at many universities around the country as a lecturer and guest tutor.
Mark has played concerts and festivals around the world and appears on over 220 CD and Vinyl releases.
Mark was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists 2024
"Drop the needle on the first track — or any track for that matter — and the first thing one is bound to notice is the amazing percussion skills of Mark Sanders" – Peter Thelen... Exposé
"Mark is just incredible and immensely diverse, he is at the center of "Kwingyaw" and it is difficult to tell what he is doing to get some of these sounds." – Bruce L Gallenter, Downtown Music Gallery, NY
Mark has worked with many greats of the British, European and American free jazz improvised music scene including Roscoe Mitchell, Roswell Rudd, Evan Parker, John Butcher, Henry Grimes, Elaine Mitchener, Wadada Leo Smith, Myra Melford, Charles Gayle , Sirone and William Parker
He has also played with Jah Wobble, Harold Budd, Bill Laswell, Christian Marclay, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ilan Volkov and The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
He is a member of many working groups including duos with Nicole Mitchell and Rhodri Davies, Neil Charles' 'Dark Days' with Cleveland Watkiss & Pat Thomas, 'Last Dream of the Morning' with John Butcher & John Edwards, 'Shifa' with Rachel Musson and Pat Thomas and 'Sarost' with Larry Stabbins & Paul Rogers.
As an educator he has taught improvisation at many universities around the country as a lecturer and guest tutor.
Mark has played concerts and festivals around the world and appears on over 220 CD and Vinyl releases.
Mark was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists 2024
"Drop the needle on the first track — or any track for that matter — and the first thing one is bound to notice is the amazing percussion skills of Mark Sanders" – Peter Thelen... Exposé
"Mark is just incredible and immensely diverse, he is at the center of "Kwingyaw" and it is difficult to tell what he is doing to get some of these sounds." – Bruce L Gallenter, Downtown Music Gallery, NY
