Thursday 31 August 2017, 7.30pm, OTO Project Space
SOLO:DUO:TRIO is a monthly night of improvised performances bringing together a wide variety of musicians and artists. Each show features a solo, a duo, and a trio performance where performers are invited to present something new or play with a person they haven’t played with before in an intimate and open environment.
SOLO: Sarah Gail Brand
DUO: Jennifer Allum & Phil Durrant
TRIO: Yoni Silver, Cath Roberts & John Macedo
£7 on the door (£5 members)
Described by The Wire magazine as “the most exciting trombone player for years” Sarah Gail Brand has recorded and performed on the international Improvised Music and Jazz scene since the early 1990s with Mark Sanders, John Edwards, Elton Dean, Evan Parker, Phil Minton, Veryan Weston, Lol Coxhill, Maggie Nicols, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Beresford, Georg Graewe, writer and comedian Stewart Lee and countless others. Sarah fronts her own tunes quartet (Sarah Gail Brand Sextet), has a long standing duo with drummer Mark Sanders, and a trio with John Edwards and Steve Beresford and continues to work as a soloist and in ad hoc ensembles. As well as being a composer, Sarah’s trombone work ranges from playing Improvised Music and Jazz, studio session work to arranging & playing in pop and rock music. Sarah is a music therapist and a professor of Improvisation at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London and leads workshops on improvisation around the world. Recordings of Sarah Gail’s work can be found on the Emanem and regardless record labels.
Jennifer Allum is a violinist who improvises and plays experimental music.
While she was a post graduate student at Goldsmiths, London she began to attend Eddie Prevost's weekly improvisation workshops where she met musicians like Ross Lambert, Ute Kanngiesser, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga and Daichi Yoshikawa. She also began working with composers such as Christian Wolff, Tom Johnson, Michael Pisaro and Michael Parsons around the same time too.
More recently she has played and recorded with The Seen, including performances of John Stevens 'For Sake Of Joy Of Study Of Oneself Together' featuring Stewart Lee as narrator.
She has a number of other recordings available, and her most recent is with John Butcher, Eddie Prevost and Ute Kanngiesser on Ftarri records. Other releases are available from Matchless Recordings.
Born near London in 1957, Phil Durrant is a multi-instrumentalist improviser/composer/sound artist who currently performs solo and group concerts. As a violinist (and member of the Butcher/Russell/ Durrant trio), he was one of the key exponents of the "group voice approach" style of improvised music. In the late 90s, his trio with Radu Malfatti and Thomas Lehn represented a shift to a more “reductionist” approach. Recently, he has been performing solo and duo concerts with Bill Thompson and Gaudenz Badrutt using a semi-modular synth system. He has also recently recorded and performed with Dominic Lash’s quartet which includes Rachel Musson and Steve Noble. As an acoustic or electric mandolinist, he has been performing duos with guitarists Daniel Thompson and Martin Vishnick. He also performs regularly in a trio with Mark Wastell and John Butcher and has many ongoing projects with drummer Emil Karlsen including a trio with Maggie Nicols. Durrant still performs regularly with the acoustic/electronic group Trio Sowari (with Bertrand Denzler and Burkhard Beins) and Mark Wastell’s The SEEN, as well as the international electronic ensemble MIMEO with Keith Rowe, Kaffe Matthews, Thomas Lehn, Rafael Toral a.o.
“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.
Cath Roberts (they/them) is an improviser, composer and artist based in Hastings, UK, whose work combines acoustic and electronic improvised music, experimental composition, and DIY publishing practices.
On saxophones Cath has collaborated with a wide range of artists and ensembles internationally for over a decade. Their band Sloth Racket has released five studio albums, touring widely and ‘lurching between riff and abstraction’ (The Wire) since forming in 2015. Other recent exploits include playing with Chris Corsano as part of his 2022 Cafe Oto residency, and being one of two UK artists (with Mandhira De Saram) commissioned by Australian Art Orchestra to co-create and perform Fresh Water – Salt Water in Melbourne and Huddersfield (a hcmf// and AAO co-commission, also in 2022).
Cath works with live electronics (SOMA Lyra-8 synthesiser, samplers, and small tabletop machines) in ongoing collaborations with Kate Carr (as Quartz Sand), Graham Dunning (as Grid & Robots) and Tullis Rennie (as Composite Mashworks). Be unafraid to open things up, a solo improvisation on tabletop electronics, was released on Fractal Meat Cuts in 2022. Cath’s sampler-based solo collage set appeared at hcmf// 2024, Sonics Hastings 2025 and Sacrum Profanum (Kraków) 2025.
In 2021 Cath was commissioned by hcmf// to create And then the next thing you know, a cross-artform installation/performance piece involving a giant, hanging, fragmented graphic score, elements of which are being integrated into a new audio-visual collaboration with Tullis Rennie. In 2024 Cath established the DIY small press Ink-Paper-Sound, and they co-run the Luminous label and the BRÅK concert series.
John Macedo is an artist and performer from London. His work explores connections, relationships, interdependence and revealing the hidden potential in all sounds, environments and technologies, often in intimate, immersive and intuitive ways.
He performs live solo and has collaborated with a wide variety of musicians and artists including Phil Julian, Graham Dunning, Tom White, Yoni Silver, John Butcher, Cath Roberts, John Edwards, Michael Speers, Steve Noble, Sue Lynch, Lee Fraser and Adam Bohman, to name a few. He has had work released by The Tapeworm, Hideous Replica, Sound Holes, and Beartown Records as well as releasing small run and object editions on his own label, The Black Plume Editions. He has performed and presented work in the UK, Europe and US and has led workshops and produced collaborative, educational and community-based projects for Whitechapel Gallery, South London Gallery, Artsadmin and New Contemporaries.
