Thursday 6 June 2019, 7.30pm
Leo Records celebrates four decades of putting out "music for the inquiring mind and the passionate heart". A small independent company producing highly original, innovative, improvisation-based new music, Leo Records' catalogue spans about 1000 releases from an incredible array of artists including Ivo Perelman, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, John Wolf Brennan, Eugene Chadbourne, Joelle Leandre, Sainkho Namchylak, Evan Parker, Sun Ra, and Cecil Taylor to name just a few; consistently publishing music that matters.
"2019 is a special year for Leo Records — it's our 40th anniversay. What started in 1979 by an enthusiastic amateur developed into a huge catalogue documenting improvised, experimental, free jazz, and new music. With four labels (Leo Records, Leo Records Laboratory, Golden Years of New Jazz, and FeetFirst) and about a thousand titles, it has become home for outstanding musicians such as Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra, Ivo Perelman, Simon Nabatov, John Wolf Brennan, Joelle Le'Andre, Slava Ganelin, Alexey Kruglov, and many others. Leo Records has become an encyclopaedia of new music from Russia, Siberia, Eastern and Central Europe, Canada, USA, and Brazil. We'll mark the anniversary at Cafe Oto in June, and in Moscow and St. Petersburg in October. Watch this space."
"Without Leo Records, our perception of the international scope of improvised music would be vastly different." – Coda Magazine
"One of the most significant independent labels of recent times..." – The Penguin Guide to Jazz
Carolyn Hume / piano, keyboards
Paul May / drums
Hume and May create dreamy, indefinite improvisations, sometimes menacing and dark, with the minimalist romanticism and twitching jungle rhythms, cinematic strings and vaporous trajectories of melancholy. In almost twenty years as a duo they've released five albums together.
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.
Fourth Page are Charlie Beresford - guitar and voice, Carolyn Hume - piano/keyboards, Peter Marsh - bass, and Paul May - drums. Formed in 2010 almost by accident, their stretched, atmospheric and entirely improvised songs have drawn comparisons to Schubert, David Sylvian, Talk Talk, Patty Waters and John Martyn. After a break of some four years to work on other projects, the band are back together, this time with a more plugged in format.
'Fourth Page takes improvised music to exciting places it hasn't really been before' - All About Jazz
“I thought it was perhaps the sort of song cycle Schubert might have written if he'd been around today. The anguish of Winterreise with its chinks of light...” - Fiona Talkington, Late Junction, BBC Radio 3
http://www.4thpage.com
https://fourthpage.bandcamp.com/album/august-2012
