Sunday 23 November 2025, 7.30pm
A stacked line-up across three days to celebrate the 60th year of the great, Swedish, saxplayer, improviser and composer, Mats Gustafsson!
Whether alongside his groups The Thing, FIRE!, and The End, or across numerous live collaborations with a veritable who's-who of new music, Gustafsson has been responsible for some absolute knock-out moments at Cafe OTO since the very beginning. These three days attempt to bring together several of these strands, featuring appearances from Thurston Moore (with whom Mats released one of the very first LPs on our in-house Otoroku label), Sofia Jernberg, Mariam Rezaei, Pat Thomas, Joachim Nordwall, Roger Turner, Mark Wastell, Liudas Mockunas, and Kit Downes - plus special guests yet to be announced.
Join us for a very special residency marking 60 times around the sun for one of the most restlessly creative artists on the scene,
"Since the late 1980s, Mats Gustafsson has been active in the worlds of free jazz, noise and rock and everything in between, above, below, around and beyond. Citing Little Richard's horn sections as a key early influence, Gustaffson's music has grown to a wild sprawling landscape held together by an unfailing dedication to intensity and exploration." – Furious
PROGRAMME – Sunday 23 November:
- Sofia Jernberg / Mariam Rezaei / Mark Wastell
- Kit Downes / Mats Gustafsson - “Fluteorgan”
- Sofia Jernberg / Mats Gustafsson
- FLÖJTER (Delphine Joussein / Mats Gustafsson)
- “The music of John Stevens” ///// Tutti Ensemble
Hailing from Umeå in Northern Sweden, Gustafsson is a saxophonist/composer/improviser working across noise, electronics, contemporary rock and free jazz as well as contemporary dance, theater and art projects. He has performed both as a solo artist and toured internationally with Peter Brötzmann, Sonic Youth, Merzbow, Jim O´Rourke, Barry Guy, Otomo Yoshihide, Yoshimi, Ken Vandermark and in working groups The Thing, Sonore, FIRE!, Gush, Boots Brown, Swedish Azz and Nash Kontroll. He also participates in the large ensembles Barry Guy New Orchestra, Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet and the NU – ensemble.
Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award-winning composer, turntablist and performer working across experimental new music, free improvisation, mutant club music and hip-hop. Described by The Wire as “one of the most technically adept and creatively daring artists to use the turntable as a musical instrument,” Rezaei uses a digital vinyl system, allowing her to manipulate an expansive range of samples in real time using classic turntablist skills and her own innovative techniques.
The Anglo-Iranian virtuoso’s latest solo release FRACTURED (Heat Crimes) has been praised by The Wire, Uncut and Bandcamp Daily, and was one of The Quietus’ cassette releases of 2024. Rezaei is a member of the international free music supergroup The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, the pioneering Turntable Trio with Evicshen and Maria Chávez, 1984 with Kobe Van Cauwenberghe and Sakina Abdou, and Fire! Orchestra.
Her co-composition with Matthew Shlomowitz, 6 Scenes for Turntable and Orchestra, was premiered at IMD Darmstadt 2023, while in October 2025, she premiered Scholar’s Record, a major commission for the 75th Donaueschinger Musiktage that draws on the legendary festival’s audio archives. Other recent projects include a collaboration with Ensemble Contrechamps and upcoming commissions from Ensemble Intercontemporain and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
Other collaborators include Pat Thomas, Bill Orcutt, Jennifer Walshe, Edward George, Farida Amadou, Mats Gustafsson, Valentina Magaletti, Robyn Rocket, Thurston Moore, Lasse Marhaug, Evicshen, Fritz Welch, Raymond MacDonald, Lukas König, Okkyung Lee, Dali de St Paul, Kenosist and Ali Robertson.
Singer and composer, born in Ethiopia in 1983 and currently based in two cities: Oslo, Norway and Stockholm, Sweden. As a singer she is developing the “instrumental” possibilities of the voice. Sofia’s singing vocabulary includes sounds and techniques that often contradict a natural singing style. She has dug deep into split tone singing, pitchless singing and distorted singing.
“...it is the singing that is most impressive. Jernberg's vocal agility is sweeping, analogous, conceivably, to the range of sounds that Wadada Leo Smith can generate with the trumpet. She is a phenomenon that merits attention.” – Karl Ackermann, All About Jazz
Kit Downes is a BBC Jazz Award winning, Mercury Music Award nominated solo recording artist for ECM Records. He has toured the world playing piano, church organ and harmonium with his own bands (‘ENEMY’, ‘Troyka’ and ‘Elt’) as well as with artists such as Squarepusher, Bill Frisell, ‘Empirical‘, Andrew Cyrille, Sofia Jernberg, Benny Greb, Mica Levi and Sam Amidon.
Kit performs solo pipe organ and solo piano concerts – as well as playing in collaborations with saxophonist Tom Challenger, cellist Lucy Railton, composer Shiva Feshareki, saxophonist Ben van Gelder and with the band ‘ENEMY’ (with Petter Eldh and James Maddren).
He is also currently working with violinist Aidan O’Rourke, drummer Seb Rochford, composer Max de Wardener and in the organ trio ‘Deadeye’ with Reinier Baas and Jonas Burgwinkel.
He has written commissions for Cheltenham Music Festival, London Contemporary Orchestra, Biel Organ Festival, Ensemble Klang at ReWire Festival, the Scottish Ensemble, Cologne Philharmonie and the Wellcome Trust. He also performed as part of the National Theatre production of ‘Network’ from 2017-2018, featuring actor Bryan Cranston.
He has performed solo organ concerts at the Elb Philharmonie in Hamburg, Lausanne Cathedral, Flagey in Brussels, the Royal Albert Hall in London as well as the Southbank Royal Festival Hall, Rochester Jazz Festival (US), St Olafs Minneapolis (US), Stavanger Konserthus, Aarhus Philharmonic Musikhuset, Darmstadt Organ Festival, Stuttgart Organ Festival, Laurenskerke in Rotterdam, Orgelpark in Amsterdam, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at Berlin Jazz Festival, and the BBC Proms amongst many others.
He holds a fellowship at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he himself studied and now teaches. He has twice been awarded 1st place in Downbeat’s Critics Poll Rising Star for Organ and Keyboard categories respectively, and his ECM records ‘Obsidian‘, ‘Dreamlife of Debris‘ and ‘Vermillion‘ have been released to much critical acclaim.
