Saturday 7 March 2020, 7.30pm
Unpredictable series presents: PIANO, TOYS, MUSIC & NOISE - a programme of events during Steve Beresford’s residency in Cafe Oto (6,7,8 March) on the occasion of his 70th birthday.
Steve is a central figure in UK free improvisation. The programme brings together a diverse group of artists to celebrate, reflect and create.
Rob Worby will be talking to Steve at Oto on Sunday afternoon.
Performances at Cafe Oto include a different DJ each night (Mark Ainley, Zakia Sewell & Mark Ainley) all with connections to Honest Jon´s Records. Old and new collaborators and friends will perform, including Alterations (Terry Day, Peter Cusack, David Toop, Steve Beresford), Douglas Benford, Hyelim Kim, Crystabel Riley, Martin Vishnick, Satoko Fukuda, Rie Nakajima, Mark Sanders, John Butcher, Angharad Davies, Max Eastley, Najma Akhtar, Blanca Regina, Pat Thomas, Mandhira de Saram & Rachel Musson.
Others Beresfords will be playing guerilla roles throughout.
Visual installations by Blanca Regina and Pierre Bouvier Patron.
Steve Beresford has been a central figure in the British and international spontaneous music scenes for over fifty years, freely improvising on piano, objects, electronics and other things with people like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink and John Zorn. Long-standing groups have included Alterations (with David Toop, Terry Day and Peter Cusack), The Melody Four (with Lol Coxhill and Tony Coe, both RIP) and London Improvisers Orchestra.
He has written songs, composed for large and small ensembles, and scored short films, feature films, TV shows and commercials. He was part of the editorial teams of ‘Musics’ and ‘Collusion’ magazines, writes about music in various contexts, and was a senior lecturer in music at the University of Westminster.
Steve has worked with Christian Marclay on various Marclay mixed media pieces. He has also worked with The Slits, Najma Akhtar, Stewart Lee, Ivor Cutler, Prince Far-I, Alan Hacker, Tania Chen, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Faradena Afifi, Blanca Regina, Ray Davies, Mandhira De Saram, The Flying Lizards, Zeena Parkins, The Portsmouth Sinfonia, Ilan Volkov, Rachel Musson, Vic Reeves, Lore Lixenberg, Valentina Magaletti and many others.
Beresford has an extensive discography - around 500 releases - as performer, arranger, free-improviser, composer, conductor and producer. He was awarded a Paul Hamlyn award for composers in 2012.
In 2021, Bloomsbury published a book by Andy Hamilton: ‘Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise: Conversations with Steve Beresford’.
In 2022, Siglio published the book ‘Call and Response’, which partnered photographs by Christian Marclay with notated improvisations by Beresford.
Tania Caroline Chen is a performance, sound artist, and free improviser. She performs internationally on piano, keyboards, digital, vintage electronics, found objects and video. She creates multidimensional sound pieces for video and live performance and has shown these works in the UK, Asia and California.
Tania has recorded with Stewart Lee, Steve Beresford, Henry Kaiser, William Winant, Wadada Leo Smith, Jon Raskin and with Bryan Day & Ben Salomen in the bands Bad Jazz and Tom Djll & Gino Robair in the trio Tender Buttons. Her solo recordings include Michael Parsons, Cornelius Cardew's Piano Sonatas and John Cage's "Music of Changes". She has recently recorded Feldman’s piano pieces “Triadic Memories” and “For Bunita Marcus” in New York and at KPFA radio in California.
www.taniachen.com
https://taniacarolinechen.bandcamp.com/music
Stewart Lee (“the world’s greatest living stand-up comedian” The Times), is in danger of being left behind. He’s approaching sixty with debilitating health conditions, his TV profile has diminished, and his once BAFTA award-winning style of stand-up seems obsolete in the face of a wave of callous Netflix-endorsed comedy of anger, monetising the denigration of minorities for millions of dollars. But he can still pack ’em in at CAFÉ OTO!
Ståle Liavik Solberg (drums/percussion) has established a base for himself as a central part of Oslo's thriving improvised music scene. Working with ensembles VCDC, Will it float? (with John Russell, Steve Beresford & John Edwards), Silva-Rasmussen-Solberg trio and in duos with Fred Lonberg-Holm and John Russell his open and attentive drumming has received many positive responses from musicians and audiences in both Europe and the USA. Solberg is also known as one of the driving forces behind the series Blow Out! in Oslo, and he curates the festival with the same name together with fellow drummer / percussionist Paal Nilssen-Love.
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
Angharad Davies is a Welsh violinist based in London working with free-improvisation, compositions and performance. Her approach to sound involves attentive listening and exploring beyond the sonic confines of her instrument, her classical training and performance expectation.
angharaddavies.com
Max Eastley is a sound installation artist and a musician. He has been an AHRC Senior Researcher at Oxford Brookes University investigating Aeolian phenomena through practice-lead research; City Sound Artist for Bonn, Germany; a guest of the DAAD, Berlin, exhibiting installations as well as working as musician and performer, and he is an artist with the Cape Farewell Climate Change Project. His most recent Aeolian installation was at Perrotts Folly for the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
He has played many solo concerts as well as in combinations with musicians such as David Toop, Evan Parker, Steve Beresford, John Butcher, Ute Wasserman, Phil Minton, Axel Dorner and Al Doyle. He has worked extensively with music and performance including works with dancers and choreographers such as Anna Huber and the Siobhan Davies Company.
His film, “Clocks of the Midnight Hours”, made with director Simon Reynell, has just been re-released by the BFI in their new compilation “Great Noises That Fill the Air”.
NAJMA AKHTAR, British born, vocalist, songwriter and actor, has an important place in music history by introducing Jazz to the traditional genre of the Ghazal (Urdu ballad), thereby creating the new musical genre of World Music.
Having been at the forefront of the World Music scene for two decades, Najma has proved to be a successful and versatile artist, renowned for using modern jazz influences with Indian vocals, creating a beautiful fusion of eastern and western styles, pushing the sound barriers by introducing Blues, Rock and other eclectic influences to new and undiscovered frontiers.
This iconic pioneer’s presence on the World Music scene had led to a new wave of inspired Asian artists of Indian descent following in her footsteps.
She has released eight critically acclaimed solo albums and has collaborated with many world-class artists, as diverse as Jah Wobble, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, Andy Summers (The Police), Basement Jaxx, Jethro Tull, Philip Glass and Gary Lucas (Captain Beefheart). She was in several musical and creative theatre projects: ‘Bollywood Dreams’ with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tara Arts and the National Theatre. Najma is set to release her new album, ‘Five Rivers’.
In-house distributor for Honest Jon's Records and founder of Ethbo - a label whose roster includes a release by Mike Cooper; Killing Melody, a collection of 70s Japanese gangster soundtracks; and the crazed garage-rockabilly of Dean Carter. He co-compiled the Moondog retrospective "The Viking Of Sixth Avenue" for Honest Jon's, and made two compilation albums of vintage music for Ace Records: Nippon Guitars - a selection of Japanese guitar pioneer Takeshi Terauchi - and the follow-up Nippon Rock'n'Roll, a compilation of Masaaki Hirao's late 50s rokabirii.
An avid collector of old Japanese records, he has played at Life Bar, for Julian Opie, at tsunami charity events and, more recently, on KNYX, NTS Live and Rinse FM.
