Friday 6 September 2019, 7.30pm
For the third night of our Peter Brotzmann Festival we're delighted to present a rare performance from the exhilarating grouping of Peter alongside two seminal figures of Japanese avant garde jazz; Takeo Moriyama (drums) and Masahiko Satoh (piano). Despite first performing as a trio in Peter's 70th year – a performance thrillingly captured on 2012's Yatagarasu LP – the trio instantly established a heady and intricate rapport that feels as though it's been honed across decades. This is a singular opportunity to witness three masters of their craft.
"Long vibrato melodic fragments bellow out of Brotzmann’s sax, supported freely by Moriyama while Satoh stabs wild chords on the piano. (Imagine Rashied Ali and Alice Coltrane playing with Ayler.)" – Free Jazz Blog
In the fields of experimental and outsider music, the word "legendary" can be applied far too liberally, but for Han Bennink no other word will do. The Dutch drummer and percussionist has had a colossal impact and influence in the fields of free jazz and improvised music and we look forward to hosting a special solo set from him.
Opening up the evening will be a first-time duo performance from Heather Leigh and percussionist Camille Emaille.
OTO Projects gratefully acknowledges the support of:
Peter Brötzmann is one of the most important and uncompromising figures in free jazz and has been at the forefront of developing a unique, European take on free improvisation since the 1960s.
Brötzmann first trained as a painter and was associated with Fluxus (Participating in various events and working as an assistant to Nam Jun Paik) before dissatisfaction with the art world moved his focus towards music. However he continued to paint and his instantly recognisable visual sensibility has produced some of our favourite LP sleeves as well as a number of gallery shows in recent years.
Self-taught on Clarinet and Saxophone, Brötzmann established himself as one of the most powerful and original players around, releasing a number of now highly sought after sides of musical invention including the epochal 'Machine Gun' session in 1968 - originally released on his own Brö private press and later recordings for FMP (Free Music Production) the label he started with Jost Gebers. Brötzmann's sound is "one of the most distinctive, life-affirming and joyous in all music" and he has performed with almost all of the major players of free music from early associations with Don Cherry and Steve Lacy to regular groupings with Peter Kowald, Alex Von Slippenbach, Han Bennink and Fred Van Hove, the Chicago Tentet (Mats Gustafsson/Joe McPhee/Ken Vandermark and more) and various one-off and ad hoc associations with many others including Keiji Haino, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton and Rashied Ali.
Drummer and multi-instrumentalist Han Bennink was born in Zaandam near Amsterdam in 1942. His first percussion instrument was a kitchen chair. Later his father, an orchestra percussionist, supplied him with a more conventional outfit, but Han never lost his taste for coaxing sounds from unlikely objects he finds backstage at concerts. He is still very fond of playing chairs.
In Holland in the 1960s, Bennink was quickly recognized as an uncommonly versatile drummer. As a hard swinger in the tradition of his hero Kenny Clarke, he accompanied touring American jazz stars, including Sonny Rollins, Ben Webster, Wes Montgomery, Johnny Griffin, Eric Dolphy and Dexter Gordon. He is heard with Gordon on the 1969 album "Live at Amsterdam Paradiso" (on the Affinity label) and with Dolphy on 1964s "Last Date" (PolyGram). At the same time, Bennink participated in the creation of a European improvised music which began to evolve a new identity, apart from its jazz roots. With fellow Dutch pioneers, pianist Misha Mengelberg and saxophonist Willem Breuker, he founded the musicians collective Instant Composers Pool in 1967. Bennink anchored various bands led by Mengelberg or Breuker, and appeared in their comic music-theater productions.
Bennink attended art school in the 1960s, and is also a successful visual artist in several media, often constructing sculpture from found objects, which may include broken drum heads and sticks. He has designed the covers for many LPs and CDs on which he appears. Bennink is represented by Amsterdam's Galerie Espace, and has been the subject of several one-man shows, including one at the Gemeente Museum in the Hague in 1995... [more]
The daughter of a coal miner, weaving a trail from West Virginia to Texas and now residing in Scotland, Heather Leigh furthers the vast unexplored reaches of pedal steel guitar. Her playing is as physical as it is phantom, combining spontaneous compositions with a feel for the full interaction of flesh with hallucinatory power sources. With a rare combination of sensitivity and strength, Leigh’s steel mainlines sanctified slide guitar and deforms it using hypnotic tone-implosions, juggling walls of bleeding amp tone with choral vocal constructs and wrenching single note ascensions. In recent years Leigh has been touring the world extensively as a solo artist following the release of her studio album, ‘I Abused Animal’ on Ideologic Organ/Editions Mego and in BRÖTZMANN/LEIGH, a duo with Peter Brötzmann, who have released 2 albums, ‘Ears Are Filled With Wonder’ and ‘Sex Tape’ on Trost. A new BRÖTZMANN/LEIGH studio LP/CD is forthcoming in 2018 and she’s currently working on a new solo LP for Editions Mego.
Camille Émaille is a French percussionist born in 1993 in Nice. She studied at the Musik-Akademie of Basel (Switzerland) with Christian Dierstein on contemporary music and with Fred Frith on free improvisation where she got a Bachelor Degree in percussion with Excellence in 2018. In 2016 she was a guest scholar at Mills College and studied there with William Winant, Fred Frith and Roscoe Mitchell. In 2017 she released her first solo album on the portugese label Creatives Sources Recordings. She considers music a part of everything, part of everyday life. That’s why she began to improvise, to feel music more as a flux, as something which is already here, something that we (the musician and the audience) just jump into… She works with many artists from varying fields, such as video, muppet theatre, shadow theater with the show Fontanalbe and plays in the musical projects Oxke Fixu (duo with clarinet), Ghoast (duo with american saxophonist Tom Weeks), ESCARGOT (her quintet with Timothée Quost on trumpet, Xavière Fertin on clarinet, Louis Frères on e-bass and Tom Malmendier on drums). She used to organize and play in « wild » events, happenings that took place in unusual locations such as closed tunnels, abandoned hospitals, highway bridges, old synagogues (festival Myosotis); events where people go without any knowledge of what will transpire…
Takeo Moriyama (森山 威男 Moriyama Takeo, born January 27, 1945 in Katsunuma (present Kōshū) in Yamanashi Prefecture) is a Japanese jazz drummer.
Moriyama played piano as a child before switching to drums in his late teens. He then attended the Tokyo University of the Arts, taking a degree in percussion performance. He joined Yosuke Yamashita's small group in 1967, and went on several international tours with the group until leaving it in 1975. He moved to Nagoya in 1977 and began leading his own groups. In addition to Yamashita he has performed or recorded with Aki Takase, Akira Miyazawa, Fumio Itabashi, Masahiko Satoh, Peter Brötzmann, Nobuyoshi Ino, Takehiro Honda, and Manfred Schoof.
Masahiko Satoh (佐藤 允彦 Satō Masahiko, born 6 October 1941) is a Japanese jazz pianist, composer and arranger.
At the age of 26, Satoh moved to the United States to study at the Berklee College of Music. He stayed for two years, during which he read about composing and arranging. He earned money working in a food shop and playing the piano in a hotel. In 1968 he wrote the music for, and conducted, a series of pieces that were combined with dance and performed in New York. After returning to Japan, he recorded Palladium, his first album as leader, and appeared on a Helen Merrill album.
In his early career in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Satoh played in a free, percussive style. Satoh played at the 1971 Berlin Jazz Festival as part of a trio; he used a then-unusual ring modulator to alter the sound. Also in the early 1970s, he recorded with Attila Zoller, Karl Berger, and Albert Mangelsdorff. He wrote the psychedelic music for the 1973 anime film Belladonna of Sadness...[more]
