Tuesday 6 October 2015, 8pm
Please note that due to ill health, Barre Phillips has unfortunately had to pull out of these shows. We wish him a speedy recovery and hope to have him back at OTO soon. To mark his 80th birthday, we will be screening some rarely-seen footage of Barre both nights.
Spontaneous, direct, together. Without any preparation, conferring, or planning. Faced with the same challenge as on the very first day they met - sculpting sounds in an empty room. AlI these three musicians can contribute is their decades of experience in free improvisation and their own personal styles of musical expression - no more and no less.
For the past fifteen years the American double bass player Barre Phillips and the two Swiss musicians Urs Leimgruber and Jacques Demierre have been coming together to play on an irregular basis and have already chalked up something in the region of two hundred concerts.
All three have unlocked a whole new dimension of their instruments and it is this that gives them their unmistakable sound. Every time they get together, their music is simultaneously reinvented and carried forward. At that point their musical styles either become more densely interwoven or evaporate until verging on silence.
Tuesday 6 October
Barre Phillips film screening
Angharad Davies / Rhodri Davies / Jacques Demierre / Urs Leimgruber / Hannah Marshall
As much a composer as a performer, Barre works in the areas of film, ballet and theater. He has written music for numerous feature films – Robert Kramer, Jacques Rivette, William Friedkin, Marcel Camus… scores for ballet for Carolyn Carlson and the Paris Opera… At the same time he has continue his experiences in the jazz and contemporary improvised music scene. Barre has recorded over 175 records, 30 under his own name. His experience spans a wide range of musical styles, from Coleman Hawkins to Derek Bailey. His work in the 70‘s with John Surman and Stu Martin, „The Trio“, became a model in itself, and influenced many younger musicians.
He is constant demand throughout Europe, North America and Japan as a soloist and teacher. Besides many other musicians he has collaborated togehter with: Archie Shepp, Chick Corea, George Russel, Lee Konitz, Ralph Towner, Charlie Mariano, Michel Portal, Albert Mangelsdorf, Anthony Braxton, Jimmy Guiffre, Paul Bley, Evan Parker, Ornette Coleman, Leonard Bernstein Terje Rypdal, Benny Golson, Pierre Favre, Cecil Taylor, Barry Guy.
Urs Leimgruber has been working since many years in the fields of Contemporary Improvisation, Jazz and New Music. He has enriched and expanded for decades the saxophone sound with new playing techniques in solo concerts and many different acclaimed groups he was touring in Europe, Canada, U.S.A. and Cuba. Among his many concerts and recordings are those with Joëlle Léandre, Marilyn Crispell, Fritz Hauser, Evan Parker, Fred Frith, Steve Lacy, Dorothea Schürch, Roger Turner, Thomas Lehn, Günter Müller… Together with Jacques Demierre he is leading the group 6ix. In the seventies, he was cofounder of the Electricjazz-Freemusic group OM. His music is to be found on CD on HatArt, Unit, FOR 4 EARS Victo and LEO.
Jacques Demierre is pianist, performer and composer, his musical and sound work develops itself in various directions : improvised music, contemporary music, sound poetry, sound installation. His compositions and sound realisations are concerned with the activity of listening and with sound space. On the piano, Jacques Demierre has developed a unique operating style, never ceasing to redraw new sound topographies, making us forget the physical weight of the instrument.
He collaborates with many improvising musicians – Okkyung Lee, Thomas Lehn, Martial Solal, Radu Malfatti, Joëlle Léandre, Axel Dörner, Fritz Hauser, Sainkho Namtchylak, Urs Blöchlinger, Irene Schweizer, Hans Koch, Isabelle Duthoit, Brandon Labelle, Jason Kahn, Butch Morris, Carlos Zingaro, Gunter Müller, Jaap Blonk, Barry Guy, Lucas Niggli, Sylvie Courvoisier, Hann Bennink, Rhodri Davis, Martin Schütz, Paul Lovens, Dorothea Schürch, Phil Minton, …-, regularly plays solo piano concerts, and works with Vincent Barras in the field of performance and language art.
Angharad Davies is a Welsh violinist based in London working with free-improvisation, compositions and performance.Her approach to sound involves attentive listening and exploring beyond the sonic confines of her instrument, her classical training and performance expectation.
Much of her work involves collaboration. She has long standing duos with Tisha Mukarji, Dominic Lash and Lina Lapelyte and plays with Common Objects, Cranc and Skogen. She has been involved in projects with Tarek Atui, Tony Conrad, Richard Dawson, Gwenno, Roberta Jean, Jack McNamara, Rie Nakajima, Tim Parkinson, Eliane Radigue, Georgia Ruth and J.G.Thirlwell.
Most of her records are released on Another Timbre but she also has releases on Absinth Records, Confrontrecords, Emanem, Potlatch and winds measure recordings.Her first orchestral piece was commissioned by LCMF in 2019.
Rhodri Davies is immersed in the worlds of improvisation, musical experimentation, composition and contemporary classical performance. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations and has released six solo albums. His regular groups include: HEN OGLEDD, Cranc, Common Objects and a duo with John Butcher. He has worked with the following artists: David Sylvian, Jenny Hval, Derek Bailey, Sofia Jernberg, Lina Lapelyte, Pat Thomas, Simon H Fell and Will Gaines.
For the last ten years Davies has been closely associated with the pioneering composer Eliane Radigue performing seventeen of her pieces. She composed OCCAM I for Davies in 2011, the first in an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. New pieces for solo harp have also been composed for him by: Christian Wolff, Carole Finer, Philip Corner, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.
In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, he was a Chapter Associate Artist (2016-19) and in 2017 he received a Creative Wales Award. He is a co-organiser of the NAWR concert series in Swansea.
Hannah Marshall is a cellist who is continuing to extract, invent, and exorcize as many sounds and emotional qualities from her instrument as she can. She has been a regular member of Alexander Hawkins’ Ensembles and has toured in Europe and South America with Luc Ex and Veryan Weston’s ensembles – SOL 6 & 12. She plays with ‘String Terrorists’ - Barrel (a trio with Violinist Alison Blunt & Violist/poet Ivor kallin). And has been invited by Fred Frith and Suichi Chino in their residencies at café Oto. She also plays with Terry Day, Tim Hodgkinson, Roger Turner, Paul May, Kay Grant, and the London Improvisers Orchestra.
