Wednesday 22 June 2022, 8pm
In 2018 Pat Thomas and XT (Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright) played together for the first time - at OTO.
They imagined a response to Cecil Taylor Akisakilla - in part as a celebration of Taylor's work and influence, in part as an exploration of the ideas of influence, and in part as a celebration of how the past becomes the future through sound.
That concert is released this May on Edition Gamut as a 2LP - Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees) - with a gatefold sleeve designed by Will Holder (F.R. David).
Tonight's concert is one of four (more or less simultaneous) events - the others in Zurich and Brussels - to launch, further extend and re-situate the ideas of this collaboration into new space(s) of strangeness where the pasts of, for example, Attitiudes of Preparation, XT's Deorlaf X and Thomas' New Jazz Jungle: Remembering (might) fuse into a new, strange potential future.
Pat Thomas studied classical piano from aged 8 and started playing Jazz from the age of 16. He has since gone on to develop an utterly unique style - embracing improvisation, jazz and new music. He has played with Derek Bailey in Company Week (1990/91) and in the trio AND (with Noble) – with Tony Oxley’s Quartet and Celebration Orchestra and in Duo with Lol Coxhill.
"Sartorially shabby as Thomas may be, and on first impression even rather stolid, he has a somewhat imperious charisma that’s immediately amplified when he starts to play. Unlike other pianists whose virtuosity seems to be racing ahead of their thought processes Thomas always seems supremely in command of his gift, and his playing, no matter how free and ready to tangle with abstraction, always carries a charge of authoritative exactitude." - The Jazzmann
Opening possibilities of language and learning from below, XT bounce questions of the specific material conditions, histories and logics of the saxophone and drum kit in a flexible, manifold process of collaboration, augmentation, bifurcation, antagonism and technological and somatic feedback. Increasingly they plug in, using synthetic and amplified saxophone and drums to extend magnify and delay what they do.
The project explicitly folds together their overlapping interests in language, learning, politics and an investigative ethics of emancipation.
