Friday 23 February 2024, 7.30pm
Three-day residency with the great Charles Hayward!
Charles Hayward is an English drummer/singer/composer and was a founding member of the experimental rock groups This Heat and Camberwell Now. He also played with early European improv group Mal Dean's Amazing Band and gigged and recorded with Phil Manzanera in Quiet Sun as well as a short stint with Gong. Since the late 80's he has concentrated on solo projects and collaborations, including Massacre (with Bill Laswell and Fred Frith), Monkey Puzzle Trio and Albert Newton (with Pat Thomas and John Edwards). The project This Is Not This Heat has recently completed a 3 year series of performances in UK, Europe, US and Japan.
Throughout a nearly 50 year career Charles has developed idiosyncratic attitudes and insights into a wide range of soundwork, spanning improvisation, song, sound as sound, using order and chaos as creative energies. He curates a six monthly series of performances, workshops and installation called Charles Hayward Presents on behalf of Lewisham Arthouse for Albany Theatre. Recent releases include ‘Objects of Desire’ cassette on Blank Editions and the piano centred song cycle ‘Begin Anywhere’ on Klanggalerie & God Unknown Records.
“As impassioned and animated offstage as behind his massive drumkit, Charles Hayward radiates a genuine intensity. He first came to wide attention as drummer with the highly influential This Heat as the embers of Post-Punk simmered off into wilder experimental tangents. He has released a dozen solo and colaborative albums, and puts on rare solo live shows which pull the raw muscular percussion at the heart of Rock into new shapes with devastatingly powerful results.” – Freq
"Telepathic magic……. Hayward is one of the most life-affirming people who stalks this dark globe." - SOUND PROJECTOR
ALBERT NEWTON is immediate, compelling and enticing. Initially a quartet comprising Harry Beckett trumpet, Pat Thomas keyboards, John Edwards double bass and Charles Hayward drums. This strong music continues and develop across a wide range of audiences and spaces including palatial cultural cathedrals, social dance events and scruffy South London pubs, a conscious strategy to break divisions put in place by an avante garde elite eager to maintain a cultural schism that confirms an avante garde elite
Since the death of Harry Beckett in 2010, the group remain a trio, leaving intriguing and mysterious gaps in the music, working its way slowly back from a ‘music of absence’ towards a place of resistance and communal joy live in the moment: verve, groove, conviction and strength
ALBERT NEWTON: 3 extreme and imaginative musicians in a joyous celebration of creative telepathy building music beyond
ALBERT NEWTON: the quantum confronts the funk
"If you've ever been tempted by free improvisation, Parker is your gateway drug." - Stewart Lee
Evan Parker has been a consistently innovative presence in British free music since the 1960s. Parker played with John Stevens in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, experimenting with new kinds of group improvisation and held a long-standing partnership with guitarist Derek Bailey. The two formed the Music Improvisation Company and later Incus Records. He also has tight associations with European free improvisations - playing on Peter Brötzmann's legendary 'Machine Gun' session (1968), with Alexander Von Schlippenbach and Paul Lovens (A trio that continues to this day), Globe Unity Orchestra, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, and Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO).
Though he has worked extensively in both large and small ensembles, Parker is perhaps best known for his solo soprano saxophone music, a singular body of work that in recent years has centred around his continuing exploration of techniques such as circular breathing, split tonguing, overblowing, multiphonics and cross-pattern fingering. These are technical devices, yet Parker's use of them is, he says, less analytical than intuitive; he has likened performing his solo work to entering a kind of trance-state. The resulting music is certainly hypnotic, an uninterrupted flow of snaky, densely-textured sound that Parker has described as "the illusion of polyphony". Many listeners have indeed found it hard to credit that one man can create such intricate, complex music in real time.
Tom Challenger (Saxophone) joins forces in an improvising trio with Alex Hawkins (Piano) and Mark Sanders (Drums). Having released an LP ‘Imasche’ in 2021, the trio bring their collective experience to create music that veers from blistering free jazz, to sonic explorations that test the limits of their instruments. Whilst all have a strong rapport with each other in other, various groupings and formations, this special night heralds the trio’s first performance together in front of a live audience.
a sequence of songs and soundfields with extreme minimal attitude
