Sunday 4 February 2018, 7.30pm
Echoing the free and politically engaged jazz and poetic experiments of the Black Arts Movement, Archie Shepp and Sun Ra, and bringing it fearlessly into the now. This is a night of innovative poetics and free jazz with a live band featuring saxophones, electronics, two bassists, and drums, with the band improvising and poets improvising around each other.
Curated by poet, novelist, musician and lecturer Anthony Joseph and featuring Jason Yarde, Rod Young, Neil Charles, Andrew John, Rachel Long, and Sid Bose.
Anthony Joseph / curator/poet
Jason Yarde / saxes, electronics, keys
Rod Young / drums
Neil Charles / upright bass
Andrew John / electric bass
Rachel Long / poetry
Sid Bose / poetry
Joshua Idehen / poetry
Anthony Joseph FRSL is an award winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. He is the author of five poetry collections and three novels. His 2018 novel Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, and long listed for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. His most recent publication is the experimental novel The Frequency of Magic. In 2019, he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. As a musician, he has released eight critically acclaimed albums, and in 2020 received a Paul Hamblyn Foundation Composers Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kings College, London. His 2022 collection Sonnets for Albert won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2022 and the OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Poetry.
Saxophonist Jason Yarde has already been a veteran of the leader's bands for some two decades. He is himself one of the most sought-after musicians of his generation, and has been a member of groups led by Andrew Hill and Jack DeJohnette, amonst many others. He is also a renowned composer, having been widely commissioned (including by the London Symphony Orchestra).
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
Rachel Long was born in London in 1988. Her poems have featured in magazines and anthologies including Magma, Butcher’s Dog, PAIN and The London Magazine. She was awarded a Jerwood/Arvon Mentorship in 2015, and was the winner of The Poetry School’s inaugural Paterson Poetry Competition 2016. She is Assistant Tutor to Jacob Sam-La Rose on the Barbican Young Poets programme, and is the leader of Octavia – Poetry Collective for Women of Colour, housed at Southbank Centre.
Octavia have featured on BBC World Service, performed at Women of the World and The London Literature Festival, and have run poetry workshops at Oxford University and for The Serpentine Galleries.
Inspired by Octavia, Rachel has curated ‘Telling Her Story’, an open workshop series for women of colour, hosted and in partnership with Southbank Centre.
Siddhartha Bose is a poet, playwright, academic and theatre-maker based in Hackney, London. He was born in India and spent seven years in the US. Siddhartha is the author of two poetry collections from Penned in the Margins, and has written and performed three works for theatre: Kalagora (2010), London's Perverted Children (2012) and The Shroud (2014).
