Maggie Nicols

Maggie Nicols joined London's legendary Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1968 as a free improvisation vocalist. She then became active running voice workshops with an involvement in local experimental theatre. She later joined the group Centipede, led by Keith Tippets and in 1977, with musician/composer Lindsay Cooper, formed the remarkable Feminist Improvising Group. She continues performing and recording challenging and beautiful work, in music and theatre, either in collaborations with a range of artists (Irene Schweitzer, Joelle Leandre, Ken Hyder, Caroline Kraabel) as well as solo.

Caroline Kraabel

Caroline Kraabel is a London-based improviser.

In 2022 Kraabel brought together a large improvising group made up of all sorts of women, non-binary, and transgender improvisers: ONe_Orchestra New.
https://oneorchestranew.com/

Other active groups include:
Transitions Trio (with Charlotte Hug and Maggie Nicols); Fit To Burst, a song-based trio with Sarah Washington and John Edwards (https://carolinekraabel.bandcamp.com/album/fit-to-burst); a duo with Pat Thomas (on piano); the Poetry Quintet with Rowland Sutherland, John Edwards and Sofia Vaisman-Maturana, which incorporates live poetry from guest poets, including Moor Mother.

Kraabel has performed and recorded with many other excellent improvisers, including Robert Wyatt, Louis Moholo, Cleveland Watkiss, Hyelim Kim, Susan Alcorn, Veryan Weston, Mariá Portugal, Neil Metcalfe, Mark Sanders, Shima Kobayashi, and Chris Corsano.

Kraabel’s solo saxophone improvisations while walking in London and elsewhere with her infant child/ren in their pushcair were broadcast weekly 2002-2006 on Resonance 104.4 FM as Taking a Life for a Walk and more recently (without children) as Going Outside. Other radio work includes a series of interviews with improvisers in many media (music, dance, visual art, politics, activism), Why is Improvising Important.
Improvisers and Improvisation, made with John Edwards, is a 22-hour radio piece including music, noise, electronics, live performance and new interviews with improvisers; broadcast as part of 2022’s Radio Art Zone: https://radioart.zone/saturday-10-september

Some Kraabel compositions:
Performances for Large Saxophone Ensemble 1, 2, 3 and 4, for 21-piece spatial saxophone/voice ensemble; Get Used To Balancing, a suite of pieces for alto sax, percussion and two flutes; Now We Are One Two, a 45-minute solo performance; Recording The Other, for soprano, cello, flute, piano and four recording devices; LAST 1, 2 and 3 for pre-recorded voice (Robert Wyatt) and large ensemble; many songs; numerous pieces for large improvising ensembles in London and around the world, including Une note n’écoutant qu’elle-même and Missing.

Kraabel’s 40-minute soundfilm about lockdown London (London 26 and 28 March 2020: imitation: inversion, https://vimeo.com/505430655) received its avant-première at Café Oto in 2021, is available on the Jazzed app, and won the 2021 Ivor Novello Award for Sound Art Composer.

Kraabel conducted, devised pieces for, and played with the London Improvisers Orchestra (LIO) from 1998-2022, and organised their 20th anniversary celebrations, which featured celebrated LIO members from throughout the group’s history.

http://www.masskraabel.com/
https://carolinekraabel.bandcamp.com/
https://oneorchestranew.com/
https://oneorchestranew.bandcamp.com/releases
https://lonelyimpulsecollective.bandcamp.com/
https://jazzed.com/

Photo by Regine Edwards

Sarah Gail Brand

Described by The Wire magazine as “the most exciting trombone player for years” Sarah Gail Brand has recorded and performed on the international Improvised Music and Jazz scene since the early 1990s with Mark Sanders, John Edwards, Elton Dean, Evan Parker, Phil Minton, Veryan Weston, Lol Coxhill, Maggie Nicols, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Beresford, Georg Graewe, writer and comedian Stewart Lee and countless others. Sarah fronts her own tunes quartet (Sarah Gail Brand Sextet), has a long standing duo with drummer Mark Sanders, and a trio with John Edwards and Steve Beresford and continues to work as a soloist and in ad hoc ensembles. As well as being a composer, Sarah’s trombone work ranges from playing Improvised Music and Jazz, studio session work to arranging & playing in pop and rock music. Sarah is a music therapist and a professor of Improvisation at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London and leads workshops on improvisation around the world. Recordings of Sarah Gail’s work can be found on the Emanem and regardless record labels.

Gina Southgate

Gina Southgate is primarily a live painter, best known on the international jazz scene where she produces spectacular, qualitative, real-time paintings. For over three decades she's painted at gigs and festivals capturing the vitality and nuance in her unique portraits of world-class musicians.

She also performs creating real-time audio/visual interactive artworks with improvising musicians. Coming up through the world of freely improvised music and spontaneous site-specific performance happenings on the avant-garde fringe in the 90's Southgate was encouraged by the inclusivity of that scene to perform herself. In this role, she creates and manipulates site-specific artworks with paint, props and objects. These are chosen for their absurdist qualities as well as for their visual and sculptural potential and their sonic abilities. She explores in performance the futility and irony of domesticity and labour. Southgate's degree training in metalwork and its necessary long-winded skills served as a springboard and a catalyst to a world where art is made in and of the moment, fuelled by and aligned with the musicians she interacts with.

She currently performs in duos with Maggie Nicols and Charles Hayward and had a longstanding duo with the late John Russell.

artistginasouthgate.com

Hyelim Kim

As composer and taegŭm (Korean flute) soloist, Dr Hyelim Kim has been using pioneering intercultural/interdisciplinary approaches through rooted in Korean traditional music.

As a taegŭm virtuoso, Kim was selected as an ‘emerging artist’ by the Korean Arts Council and as the Kumho Young Artist, has been invited to perform a live session with Nils Frahm on BBC Radio 3’s celebrated Late Junction, and was the soloist on the world premier of a taegŭm concertino performed with the Orchestre de chambre de Paris, to name a few. She has also won prizes at various acclaimed competitions, including the Gold Medal at the Korean National Taegŭm Competition and the 1st prize at the Korean National Chongro Music Competition. Kim has performed at various prestigious festivals worldwide, including the London Jazz Festival, Melbourne Women’s Festival (Melbourne), China International Bamboo Flute Festival (Yuping), the World Classics (England), the Shubbak Festival (London), and the Creativity Unlimited Festival (Sydney). Kim is a regular member of the Third Orchestra (Barbican Centre).

Kim has extended her musical practice to the interdisciplinary sphere. ‘Korean Music with Nature’ is a series of videos she directed and performed in with support from the Korean Ministry of Culture, and PRS Foundation (UK) funded her ‘Dansang’ short films, which won the Best Music Award at the Experimental, Dance & Music Film Festival (Los Angeles) in 2021. Some of Kim’s projects have been documented in her monograph ‘Tradition and Creativity in Korean Taegŭm Flute Performance’ published by Routledge in 2021.

Gwendolyn Kassenaar

Gwendolyn Kassenaar is a London-based, Dutch Visual Artist & Performer. A graduate from Chelsea College of Art, her work is based on rhythm, music and dance, capturing the intangible poetry of the ephemeral moment.

Gwendolyn is an established participant in the improvised music scene, regularly painting live improvised at the Vortex, Café Oto, Iklectik and Hundred Years Gallery. She collaborates with highly regarded musicians including celebrated Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang, Orphy Robinson MBE and legendary improviser Maggie Nicols. She co-founded new collective Noisy Women, whose launch featured in iconic magazine The Wire, and was recently interviewed on Soho Radio.

Gwendolyn’s vivacious artworks are instantly recognisable with her distinct use of colour. Her work featured at the prestigious Menuhin Concert Hall, Toulouse Lautrec, Vortex Jazz Club, album covers and in private art collections in the UK and abroad. She just held her first solo show and launched Limited Edition Prints.

@GwendolynKassenaar
https://www.instagram.com/gwendolynkassenaar/
https://www.facebook.com/gwendolynkassenaar/
https://www.youtube.com/@gwendolynkassenaar
www.gwendolynkassenaar.com

Rachelle Allen-Sherwood

Rachelle Allen-Sherwood spent most of her childhood and early adult life in Japan before moving to the UK. Her art reflects a rich multicultural heritage. Using traditional Japanese Sumi ink and calligraphic materials, she explores notions of movement and space, focusing on process rather than the end result.

Rachelle Allen-Sherwood achieved her Fine Art undergraduate degree from University of Greenwich in 2011, graduating with First Class Honours. Her works are privately held in USA, Japan, Spain, France, Switzerland as well as in the UK by private collectors. Rachelle exhibits regularly in London, as part of the Tunnel Artist Collective. She is currently based in Canterbury, Kent.

https://www.rachelleallen-sherwood.com/

New Noveta

New Noveta are artists Keira Fox(UK) and Ellen Freed (SWE) formed in London 2011.

They have exhibited and performed internationally since. Notable shows including most recently their new performance "Steel my Heart" for Sound of the City festival at Wuppertal Opera House, part of the Ester Krumbachova retrospective at House of Arts, Brno 2021, included in the group exhibition WITCH HUNT at Kunthalle Charlottenberg, CPH 2020 and their solo show Fateful, for the Kunstverein, Freiburg in 2018.

Their practice revolves around social conformity and its affects, drawing on behaviors and actions that divert from the normative acceptable societal modes day to day. In their performances they display reactionary anxiety/hysteria conducted through repetitive ritualistic tasks as a means of a necessary release and revolt.

Their practice is often collaborative, commissioning and working with fellow musicians, costume designers and makers on installations, costumes and props specific for each show.

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