2012 recording of AMM duo Prévost & Tilbury at Slovenia's Španski Borci. Surely both artists felt a certain respect playing in a place with references to the Spanish Civil War and no doubt it influences their playing here. Sparse and heavy.
"John Tilbury’s piano playing is quiet yet emphatic, the notes suspended and widely spaced. Eddie Prévost’s cymbals and bass drum skin moan and shimmer, apt but never obvious. Like an atom, it is mostly empty, but filled with potential power. Prévost and Tilbury’s freely improvised dialogue carries on an episodic discussion that has gone on since the days of Swinging London, sometimes restive, sometimes terribly fractured, and now spare and unerringly right. They police themselves, never imposing like the fascists that the Spanish fighters resisted." – Bill Meyer, January 2016
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John Tilbury / piano
Eddie Prévost / percussion
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Recorded by Izack Zupan at the festival Neposlusno (Sound Disobedience) in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2012. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux. Artwork by Myah Chen.
Available as a 320k MP3 or 16bit FLAC download.
Tracklisting:
1. Spanish Fighters - 37:12
Eddie Prévost began his life in music as a jazz drummer. A recurring interest in this form has been maintained, although always with an experimental ethos. Along the way he has maintained his fifty-year plus experimental credentials with AMM and numerous other improvisation projects, including his now twenty-year long weekly workshop. But drumming has generally been backgrounded to his experimental percussion work. More though, is to be expected of his drumming in 2020 on forthcoming multi-CD album: The Unexpected Alchemy. A part of this Krakow festival recording features the drums and saxophone trio of Ken Vandermark, Hamid Drake, and Eddie Prévost. His most recent released recordings include AMM’s: An Unintended Legacy, and a duo with John Butcher - Visionary Fantasies, both on Matchless Recordings. Also, a solo percussion LP on the Earshots label called Matching Mix. Later, in 2020 he meets with Jason Yarde and Nathan Moore, while in March concerts and recording will hear him drumming with US guitarist Henry Kaiser and saxophonist Binker Golding.
And, early 2020 should see the publication of his fourth book: An Uncommon Music for the Common Man: a polemical memoir.
“Prévost's free drumming flows superbly making use of his formidable technique. It’s as though there has never been an Elvin Jones or Max Roach.” - Melody Maker
“Relentlessly innovative yet full of swing and fire.” – Morning Star
John Tilbury is renowned for his peerless interpretation of the piano music of Morton Feldman, John Cage, Christian Wolff and Howard Skempton. In addition to the performances and seminal recordings that he has made of these composers’ works, he has been an eloquent advocate of their music in his writing and speaking about them. The same is true of the attention he has paid to the music and ideas of Cornelius Cardew, the subject of his authoritative biography published in 2008, and with whom he played in the legendary improvisation groups the Scratch Orchestra and AMM. In the last ten years John Tilbury has performed a range of plays and prose pieces by Samuel Beckett.
Video by Helen Petts
