Sunday 8 January 2023, 2pm
Recently debuting as a duo in late 2022 after many years of collaboration, Charbin & Prevost return to Café OTO for an improvised performance. Also on the bill, NO Moore, presents pre-prepared music (prepared air) with live guitar improvisation.
Marjolaine Charbin is a French pianist performer based in London. After studying sound engineering and later jazz piano at the conservatoire in Brussels, she has developed a practice rooted in improvisation. Her sonic palette moves fluidly between prepared and unprepared piano: inside-piano techniques, objects, contact microphones and voice merge with the keyboard.
She has collaborated with a wide range of musicians including Eddie Prévost, Ute Kanngiesser, John Butcher, Phil Durrant, Bill Thompson, Artur Vidal, Chris Cundy, Angharad Davies, Grundik Kassiansky, Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, Dominic Lash, Maggie Nichols… as well as with dancers, theatre and film.
Drawing from her practice of musical, sonic and philosophical fragments that attracts her attention, Marjolaine approaches performance as a site of discovery and social reconstruction.
Latest releases include, on matchless recordings, a duet with Eddie Prévost “The Cry of a Dove Announcing Rain” and “The Art of Noticing”, with John Butcher, Ute Kanngiesser and Eddie Prévost, which was listed amongst the 10 best albums of the year 2023 by the New York City Jazz Review. She received a grant from the Arts Council England to develop her creative practice in 2022.
https://www.marjolainecharbin.com
https://www.instagram.com/marjolainecharbin/
https://marjolainecharbin.bandcamp.com
A founder-member of AMM (1965-2022)
“[Eddie Prévost’s] is one of the greatest metallurgists that music has produced. […] sparks delicately arcing through the air, of slow lava ingesting its surroundings, of the shifting grind of tectonic plates across each other, of the rustle and glint of a firebird darting between shadows, and of ore smashing into the surface of the earth; but perhaps this language is overwrought: all that needs to be remarked upon is Prévost's industry, his diligence.”
Nathan Moore — liner note to AMM’s ‘Indúsria’
Matchless Recordings mrcd105.
But beyond this work Prévost has also maintained a relationship with the jazz drum-kit.
“His free drumming flows superbly making perfect use of his formidable technique, but his most startling feature is his stylelessness. It’s as though there has never been an Elvin Jones or a Max Roach.” - review of a set with saxophonist Lou Gare, Melody Maker (27.03.1975)
“Prévost, meanwhile, was simply miraculous; it was fascinating to watch him and to compare his approach with that of a Kern or a Nilssen-Love. I can only say that he was possessed of an uncanny, burning intentness that navigated the ensemble through passages of stark, sculpted beauty, grave concentration and full-on, bristling energy.”
Blue Tomato, Vienna 2012. In concert with Marilyn Crispell and Harrison Smith. Richard Rees-Jones
“An excellent release from one of the finest percussionists around, jazz or otherwise.” review of Prévost’s solo CD ‘Collider’
Matchless Recordings mrcd106 – Brian Olewnic, Squidsear (2022).
“Relentlessly innovative yet full of swing and fire.” – Morning Star
Pre-prepared music (prepared air) with live guitar improvisation.
This piece is inspired by the films of Peter Tscherkassky, particularly Outer Space (1999) and Dream Work (2001). My aim is not to create a point-to-point resemblance or musical equivalent, nor to apply Tscherkassky’s production techniques to music but, rather, to simply produce an affect analogous to the films in a different medium. Through this, to further the development of my own musical vocabulary and responsiveness, in a personal drive towards the universal.
Pertinent issues: limits and affordances of the medium; free will and identity in their relation to materiality; signal to noise ratios; displacement and condensation.
Why use prepared air? Admittedly, I don’t read music notation. Obviously, notation is a memorialisation by the composer and a communication to the performer: therefore, a question of memory and practice. Prepared air allows for a more imprecise memory and better miscommunications. Consequently, a different type of performance/practice has to be developed in the moment (i.e. improvised). Prepared air encourages a disclosed composition, or decomposition (rather than an enclosed improvisation), to take place. The interesting possibility is that this gives access to a point where entropy and negentropy (what breaks down and what (self) organises) become indistinct.
NO Moore can be heard on recent releases Traktor (Shrike Records, with Iris Ederer and Eddie Prévost) and Under the Sun (Matchless Recordings, with Rachel Musson, Olie Brice, and Eddie Prévost).
