Sunday 31 July 2022, 2pm
Special matinee show from the trio of Steve Noble, Yoni Silver and John Edwards, launching their debut LP, HEME, which was recorded at OTO during lockdown in April 2021.
Building on Steve Noble and Yoni Silver’s previous work together as a duo on HOME, they are joined by the inexhaustible talents of double bass player John Edwards. Steve and John are no strangers to each other and, with Yoni’s talents for invention with the bass clarinet, the trio have pieced together a freshly textural and teasingly explorational set of tracks. Noble's powerful and shape-shifting percussion underpinning and interlocking with Edwards’s bass, pushing the sound into fresh territories.; Silver’s masterful and ever innovative clarinet weaving and breaking new ground for the trio to explore.
Steve Noble is London's leading drummer, a fearless and constantly inventive improviser whose super-precise, ultra-propulsive and hyper-detailed playing has galvanized encounters with Derek Bailey, Matthew Shipp, Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, Stephen O'Malley, Joe McPhee, Alex Ward, Rhodri Davies and many, many more.
In the early eighties, Noble played with the Nigerian master drummer Elkan Ogunde, Rip Rig and Panic, Brion Gysin and the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, before going on to work with the pianist Alex Maguire and with Derek Bailey (including Company Weeks 1987, 89 and 90). He was featured in the Bailey's excellent TV series on Improvisation for Channel 4 based on his book ‘Improvisation; its nature and practise’. He has toured and performed throughout Europe, Africa and America and currently leads the groups N.E.W (with John Edwards and Alex Ward) and DECOY (with John Edwards and Alexander Hawkins).
“deftly weaves a breathtaking range of techniques and textures on the instrument, spanning frenetic highs to lows of bracing physicality. From dizzying clusters of notes to multilayered melodicism […] Silver gives a visceral, bodily performance”
Bass clarinet and multi-instrumental solos, keyboard player in Charles Hayward’s band Abstract Concrete, member of Ana Maria Avram and Iancu Dumitrescu's Hyperion Ensemble, RAY trio with Ashley Paul and Otto Willberg, orchestral song arrangener for Nico Teen and others, collaborations with Steve Noble, Sharon Gal, John Edwards, etc.
John Edwards grew up in London and started experimenting with the bass guitar before he switched in his twenties to play double bass. He is deeply rooted in the creative free jazz and improvisation genre. Since the 80ties he is as soloist and in many groups and ensembles in Europe active and became one of the most renowned bass players. He played/plays regular for example with Peter Brötzmann, Joe Mc Phee, Phil Minton, Maggie Nichols, Evan Parker, Roscoe Michtell, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Mark Sanders, Caroline Kraabel, John Butcher, Pat Thomas, Irène Schweizer, Hans Koch, Florian Stoffner, Gabriele Mitelli, John Dikeman.
"I think John Edwards is absolutely remarkable: there’s never been anything like him before, anywhere in jazz." - Richard Williams, The Blue Moment
