Wednesday 20 May 2015, 8pm
Matthew Shipp and John Butcher first played together here at OTO on Valentine’s Day 2010. It was an unusual, perhaps even awkward combination, given Shipp’s deep roots in the American free jazz tradition and Butcher’s key position at the more abstract end of European free improvisation. But the pairing proved productive, and the two pugnacious individualists found a common space in which to work and forge new musical bonds, as documented on the At Oto album (Fataka, 2012). Since then they’ve only played together once, again at Oto, with synthesizer player Thomas Lehn, a longstanding associate of Butcher’s, who added extra layers of electrical strangeness and echo to the proceedings.
For this third encounter, they’re joined by one of Shipp’s closest musical collaborators, double bassist Michael Bisio, whose harmonic acumen, rhythmic intensity, and coruscating solos have provided the elastic foundations of Shipp’s trio since 2009. Recently, they’ve been working in drum-free contexts as well, releasing the critically acclaimed duo album Floating Ice in 2012 and a trio with Mat Maneri coming up in April (both on Relative Pitch Records).
Presented in association with Fataka.
“Shipp’s music has gotten slower and more meditative over time, but it’s a muscular sort of meditativeness, more like a patient prison-yard weight-lifting session than an hour spent sitting on a mat contemplating the universe. There’s a coiled energy present at all times, no matter how slow the rhythm or how ornamental the melodies may be.” – Phil Freeman, Burning Ambulance
“Harmonically fulsome and burring, Shipp refuses to lay off the gas for too long and this pushes Butcher into a simply howling phase (and it’s quite rare to hear him do this these days). At times it’s exhilarating, and it makes the more spacious passages that follow even more effective. Butcher’s liquid and animal sounds that emerge from near silence are extremely engaging, but best of all is the intensely complex weave of high velocity lines that close out the piece." – Jason Bivins, Point of Departure
“The mantra-like minimalism of Shipp's cascading pianism finds stylistic accord in Bisio's bustling pizzicato, their interweaving phrases vacillating between dynamic extremes of texture, tone and volume with impeccable timing. . . . Shipp's pointed key strikes accentuate Bisio's coarse glissandi as the two pirouette unfettered until the final notes drift into oblivion.” – Troy Collins, All About Jazz
Steeped in the history of the jazz avant-garde yet with an unmistakeably individual voice, Matthew Shipp has established himself as one of the most important figures in American creative music today. Combining an uncompromising personal language with an exemplary eclecticism, Shipp has worked with an astonishing array of musicians, including Roscoe Mitchell, David S. Ware, Antipop Consortium, William Parker, Mat Maneri, Spring Heel Jack, J Spaceman, Evan Parker, and Nate Wooley.
“Shipp’s approach to the keyboard is a study of tone, decay, muscle, and grace . . . round filigree unfolding amid monumental bell-like clangs . . . rangy attack that volleys from dense clusters that nearly distort themselves to barely perceptible skims of the keyboard . . . stark and insistent and utterly massive.” – Clifford Allen, Tiny Mix Tapes
Bassist for the Matthew Shipp Trio since 2009. Michael invariably astounds audiences with the beauty of his tone and the intensity of his very personal musical language. His music has garnered 4 1/2 stars fromDownBeat, Jazz Timesstates his music “resonates with intelligence, emotional depth and probing virtuosity.” Journalist Paul DeBarros inSignal to Noisenotes; “For years free improvisers have explored the tactile aspect of performance, in which the nature of the encounter between the player and the instrument becomes the subject of the music itself. Bisio is one of the few musicians that has managed to meld this high-concept sense of physicality with the soulful charge of jazz. His fiddle-high, scraped overtones create a tangled choir that is impossible to resist; his expressiveness with the bow is unmatched. Having whirled the listener into a transportive state, he gently shows them the way out...”
Born in Brighton and living in London, John Butcher is a saxophonist whose work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multi tracked pieces and explorations with feedback, unusual acoustics and non-concert locations. He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with a sense of place. Resonant Spaces, for example, is a collection of performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.
Butcher originally studied Physics, but after publishing a PH.D (1982) on quantum chromodynamics he left academia and took off with music. He has since collaborated with hundreds of artists, some for many decades, including Derek Bailey, Eddie Prévost, Angharad Davies, John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Okkyung Lee, Andy Moor, Sophie Agnel, Christian Marclay, Pat Thomas, Phil Minton, Rhodri Davies, Tony Buck, Magda Mayas, John Russell, Chris Corsano, Steve Beresford, Ståle Liavik Solberg, and Matthew Shipp.
Additionally he values occasional encounters - with large groups ranging from the WDR Sinfonieorchester (as soloist), and the 20+ piece EX Orkest to duos with Akio Suzuki, Liz Allbee, Keiji Haino, Isabelle Duthois, David Toop, Mariam Rezaei, Fred Frith and Joe McPhee.
Recent compositions include “Fluid Fixations” (an hcmf commission), “Penny Wands” for Futurist Intonarumori, “Good Liquor…” for the London Sinfonietta and “Tarab Cuts” (shortlisted for a British Composer’s Award).
"Over 40 years of sustained performance and publishing, English saxophonist, improvisor and composer John Butcher has shaped much of what soprano and tenor saxophone can do, and what their roles and vocabulary in improvised music might be. I’ve always heard Butcher’s playing as a kind of nose-to-tail saxophony, where the whole instrument from reed-tip to brim of bell is available, accessible and articulate. Few other saxophonists slice as sharply back into the physical history, material (and physics) of the instrument, across its near 200 year history. When Hector Berlioz wrote of his friend Adolphe Sax’s then fresh invention, “the varied beauty of its accent, sometimes serious, sometimes calm, sometimes impassioned, dreamy or melancholic, or vague”, he could have been imagining Butcher's distinctively clean but complex, enquiring soundworld." WIRE - October 2024. The Primer by Seymour Wright
