Friday 13 July 2018, 8pm, OTO Project Space
Fantastic quartet of improsiving musicians featuring the distinctive talents of Canadian guitarist Arthur Bull, singer & vocal artist Phil Minton, clarinetist & guitarist Alex Ward and drummer / percussionist Roger Turner.
Arthur Bull has been active on the improvised music scene in Canada since the mid-1970s, during the early days of the Music Gallery in Toronto. In 1980’s he was a member of the Bill Smith Ensemble, participating in numerous multimedia collaborations, and he also toured with Smith in the music/performance duo Duck Soup. Since the late 1990’s he primarily worked with fellow guitarist Daniel Heïkalo, touring, recording and appearing in several major festivals. Over the years Arthur Bull has collaborated with many leading Canadian improvisers, and has also performed in concert with international players, including Roscoe Mitchell, John Tchicai, Joe McPhee, Roger Turner, Peter Kowald, Paul Rutherford, Bob Cobbing, Fred Anderson, Kidd Jordan, John Russell, Mike Cooper, and John Butcher. He has released more than 16 CDs over the years, including solo, duo and group recordings, and has toured extensively, most recently in Europe and Mexico. Arthur is also a long-time blues musician, and has performed both as a solo act, and as a member of Les Surruralist(e)s and the Spokes. Arthur Bull is a published poet, with four poetry books to his name, and works as an activist for small-scale fisheries, locally and internationally. He lives on Digby Neck in Nova Scotia, Canada.
http://preparedguitar.blogspot.ca/2014/06/arthur-bull-13-questions.html
For a long time now Phil Minton has been working as a improvising singer, solo and in groups and situations at various locations all over the place, deserts, quarries, concert halls, pubs, holes, dodgy clubs, containers, up trees, in prisons, on mountains, in churches, under bridges and cafe oto etc.
Phil Minton comes from Torquay. He played trumpet and sang with the Mike Westbrook Band in the early 60s - Then in dance and rock bands in Europe for the later of part of the decade. He returned to England in 1971, rejoining Westbrook and was involved in many of his projects until the mid 1980′s.
For most of the last forty years, Minton has been working as an improvising singer in lots of groups, orchestras, and situations. Numerous composers have written music especially for his extended vocal techniques. He has a quartet with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner and John Butcher, and ongoing duos, trios and quartets with above and many other musicians, including tours with American singer Audrey Chen - with whom he has sang far and wide in the last ten years.
Since the eighties, His Feral Choir, where he voice-conducts workshops and concerts for anyone who wants to sing, has performed in over twenty countries.
Over decades Roger Turner has brought the renowned volcanic power and finely-honed precision of his drum work to ensembles that have forged substantial connections with musicians both sides of the Atlantic and more recently from Japan. In addition to pioneering an acoustic percussive language that can run in tandem with approaches to contemporary electronic instruments, he has worked extensively in the microscopic laboratory of the acoustic duo situation where he acquired a highly developed sense of detail and of dynamic control. One of that select group of world-class players who have collectively redefined the language of contemporary percussion, in Turner's hands minute inflections of tension can shape the group's musical direction and galvanise a new level of audience experience.
