Monday 2 December 2024, 7.30pm
Commissioned by the Torino Jazz Festival
Pianist and composer Alexander Hawkins has long cited the music of Duke Ellington as a fundamental influence. It is certainly his longest-standing one – hearing the 1929 Ellington recording 'Saturday Night Function' is one of his very earliest memories. It has not been uncommon over the years for Hawkins to touch down on snippets of Ellingtonia during his solo performances, but this is the first time he has devoted an entire concert to this music. This has perhaps been his inner music fan guiding him: when the records are so perfect, what could possibly be added?
Suite Duke, therefore, is not a repertory performance - something which would risk undermining the originality and single-mindedness which is the fundamental beauty of Ellington's music - but instead a tapestry, woven together from solo piano deconstructions of the compositions and a vast library of tiny samples taken from throughout Ellington's recorded output. These sampled and processed excursions into the very fabric of Ellington's soundworld all sit alongside an original film, which includes elements from never-before publicly seen photographs of the Ellington band from the 1960s.
Opening the show will be Neil Charles, who will offer some solo double bass interpretations of Ellington's work
'Splendid...dense, sensitive, restless pianism [from Hawkins]...Wright helped give a dreamlike dimension to the flow of music and images...a seamless hour...with a dazzling close' – Il Manifesto
'a work of extremely refined poetry' – Jazz Convention
Alexander Hawkins’ work ranges from his acclaimed solo performances (‘intensely intricate…powerful, technically brilliant and melodically inventive’) through to works on a much larger canvas, such as his Togetherness Music ('[a] masterpiece that can stand next to the best works of Mitchell, Braxton or Parker’). He collaborates regularly with all generations of creative musicians, including the likes of Anthony Braxton, Marshall Allen, Evan Parker, John Surman, Joe McPhee, Hamid Drake, Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, Sofia Jernberg, Shabaka Hutchings, and many others. Further creative associations, with two very different icons of African music, Louis Moholo-Moholo and Mulatu Astatke, stretch back for well over a decade. He has been widely commissioned as a composer, including by the likes of the BBC, Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, and numerous festivals. His performance schedule takes him to club, concert hall, and festival stages worldwide.
"Sounds like all the future jazz you might imagine without ever being able to conceive of the details" – The Guardian
Matt Wright works as a composer, improviser and sound artist at the edges of concert and club culture, working closely with Evan Parker in their shared Trance Map project. He has presented work at venues such as the Sydney Opera House, Le Poisson Rouge (New York), the Muziekcentrum an ‘t IJ (Amsterdam), The Kim Ma Theatre (Vietnam) and Abbey Road Studios, Tate Britain and Tate Modern (London). He has been commissioned by organisations such as hcmf//, Transit Festival (Belgium) and MATA Festival (New York), with broadcasts on TV across Europe, and globally on radio, including a two-hour focus on his work on the ABC Network in Australia. Reviews of his projects have appeared in the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, Vietnam Today and the Financial Times. In 2014, he remixed Robert Wyatt's Cuckooland album into a concert-length collaboration with Elaine Mitchener, Tony Hymas and the Brodsky Quartet and in 2015 Totem for Den Haag (available on Music at the Edge of Collapse with Ensemble Klang) was one of three pieces selected by hcmf// to represent UK new music in the UK/Mexico dual year. His music is released on Ensemble Klang records, psi, Migro and Extra Normal. Matt studied in Huddersfield, The Hague and at Goldsmiths and is Professor of Composition and Sonic Art at Canterbury Christ Church University in the UK.
Neil Charles is one of the most in-demand musicians on the scene, with a huge array of credits to his name, including Jack DeJohnette, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Mingus Big Band, Jose James, Jerry Dammers, Courtney Pine, and Terence Blanchard. His own projects have included Zed U, with Shabaka Hutchings and Tom Skinner, and the more recent ensemble Dark Days, dealing with the work of James Baldwin. Most recently, he has been heard across the international scene with Gabriels. As well as being known as a bass player with a huge sound and immaculate sense of time, he is equally renowned as a producer, going by the alias Ben Marc.
"Bassist Neil Charles went flying, from the first moment filling the space with the sound of his mighty wings Henning Bolte," – Europe Jazz Media Chart
