Monday 13 January 2025, 7.30pm
Throughout my career as an improvising musician, I have had an affinity with the UK/Irish folk music scene both musically and politically. Both scenes seemingly ‘kick against the systems’ and have healthy DIY aesthetics combined with a very supportive, caring, non-hierarchical approach to music making and organisation.
The chosen musicians for this performance not only all play ‘folk instruments’ but utilise material that is also heard in the ‘Alt Folk’ scene. My personal folk heroes start with Dave Swarbrick - both his violin and mandolin playing - and Martin Carthy and include more recent artists such as Lankum and John Francis Flynn who both include drones as part of their style.
I have chosen ‘Combinations’ as the title of this gig because not only does it reflect the structure - various small groups in an evolving soundscape - but also the fact that early Trade Unions were called ‘Combinations’. – Phil Durrant
Phil Durrant / mandolin, octave mandola, dulcimer stick,
Fara Afifi / violin, viola, vocals, perc
Douglas Benford / harmonium, tenor recorder, objects
David Birchall / guitars, banjo
John Bisset / lap steel guitar
Francis Comyn / frame drum, hand percussion, wind chimes, gongs
Adam Fairhall / accordion
Petra Haller / tap dance
Sylvia Hallett / violin, hurdy gurdy, electronics
John Jasnoch / guitars, mandolin, banjo, oud
Theodora Laird / vocals,
Maggie Nicols / vocals, taps, piano
John McGrath / guitar
Richard Scott / viola, fiddle, mandolin
Caius Williams / double bass
Born near London in 1957, Phil Durrant is a multi-instrumentalist improviser/composer/sound artist who currently performs solo and group concerts. As a violinist (and member of the Butcher/Russell/ Durrant trio), he was one of the key exponents of the "group voice approach" style of improvised music. In the late 90s, his trio with Radu Malfatti and Thomas Lehn represented a shift to a more “reductionist” approach. Recently, he has been performing solo and duo concerts with Bill Thompson and Gaudenz Badrutt using a semi-modular synth system. He has also recently recorded and performed with Dominic Lash’s quartet which includes Rachel Musson and Steve Noble. As an acoustic or electric mandolinist, he has been performing duos with guitarists Daniel Thompson and Martin Vishnick. He also performs regularly in a trio with Mark Wastell and John Butcher and has many ongoing projects with drummer Emil Karlsen including a trio with Maggie Nicols. Durrant still performs regularly with the acoustic/electronic group Trio Sowari (with Bertrand Denzler and Burkhard Beins) and Mark Wastell’s The SEEN, as well as the international electronic ensemble MIMEO with Keith Rowe, Kaffe Matthews, Thomas Lehn, Rafael Toral a.o.
Faradena Afifi: Founder of The Noisy Women Present, and The Noisy People’s Improvising Orchestra, Fara is also an Initiator, Connector and Performer. Faradena is a person with neurodiversity who has mixed Afghan/British heritage. She is a T’ai Chi Chuan practitioner/instructor, folk singer and improvising community musician who plays bowed string instruments, piano and percussion. She also specialises in healing music and T’ai Chi-based exercises for people with learning differences and brain injuries/conditions.
During lockdown 2020, through jamming online with Maggie Nicols, Fara joined the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (GIO) and the Improvising Ensemble (IE). This led to performing with the London Improvisers Orchestra (LIO), and with Maggie Nicol’s Creative Liberation Orchestra in Stockholm 2021 and various musicians since. She co-leads the International Online Improvising Workshop with Tony Hardie Bick, the online sister of The London Improvising Workshop, originally started by Eddie Prevost.
When not teaching or performing on stage, she is out busking with Cambridge musician Banjo Nick.
https://faradenaafifi.bandcamp.com/releases
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNaedkKjaEKqvLIumjhy0TA
www.grey-heron.com
As a composer and sound artist, Douglas Benford has been involved in various audio genres since the late 1980s, performing at many institutions/venues in the UK (Bristol’s Arnolfini, London’s Science Museum, Tate Modern, The Roundhouse, ICA and Glasgow’s CCA), festivals worldwide and had installation work in numerous UK art spaces. He is a regular contributor to the London Improvisers Orchestra, as well as playing with Confront Recordings’ The Seen collective. His collaborators in recent years have included Blanca Regina, Dominic Lash, Martin Vishnick, Crystabel Riley, poet Tamar Yoseloff, Olivia Moore, Matt Atkins, Lina Lapelyte, Jem Finer, Clive Bell, John Edwards, Jennifer Allum, Sue Lynch, sculptor Rob Olins and many more.
David Birchall is a performer living in Manchester. He has played improvised music in the UK, Europe, Russia, Palestine, USA & Japan and undertaken artist residencies at The Penthouse (Manchester, UK) and Beppu Project (Beppu, JP). His work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 6 Music & SWR in Germany. He organises and co-curators the Curious Ear series for improvised music in Manchester.
Fran Comyn is an improviser and percussionist based in the north of England. He has performed and recorded solo and in a number of group and collaborative projects based in London, Manchester and Sheffield including works featured on BBC Radio 3 and WFMU.
Over the past decade, Adam Fairhall has forged a reputation internationally as a jazz pianist and improviser of exceptional versatility. He is based near Manchester, England, and highly active on that city’s burgeoning creative music scene. In Adam’s playing, idioms drawn from any period of jazz history may be blended, collided, subverted, hinted at or played completely ‘straight’. His aim is to place his deep knowledge of jazz piano techniques, from ragtime to free jazz, at the service of playful, spontaneous invention, within a freewheeling and sometimes rough-edged improvisational style that creates its own momentum and energy
Adam’s 2012 release under his own name, The Imaginary Delta (SLAM), was named Album of the Year by influential US blog Bird Is The Worm, and revealed a deep understanding of early jazz and the ways in which it can connect to free jazz and contemporary idioms. He continued this synthesis in his 2017 solo piano album, Friendly Ghosts (Efpi), while his 2019 live EP, Little Instruments (also on Efpi), hears him using four different portable keyboard instruments – the Dulcitone, single reed free-bass accordion, toy piano and harmonium – developing a unique musical language for each. In addition to his solo projects, Fairhall co-leads organ trio Revival Room with Mark Hanslip & Johnny Hunter, and is widely known as the pianist in Nat Birchall’s Coltrane-inspired band and as a free improviser with such acclaimed groups as The Spirit Farm.
Sylvia Hallett is a composer and improviser, working with instruments (violin, hurdy-gurdy, saw,) and objects (bowed bicycle wheel, bowed branches etc) alongside simple live sound processing. She has worked extensively with dancers and in theatre, most recently with choreographer Miranda Tufnell on a tour of outdoor site specific venues in Northumberland. Recent albums: Tree Time and Bolt and Latch.
http://www.sylviahallett.co.uk/
John Jasnoch: guitar, mandolin, oud, uke, (born 1953, Isle of Sheppey, Kent, UK) started out playing bluegrass and country music. In 1979 he moved to Sheffield becoming part of the Sheffield improvised music community. From this evolved a number of regular - including those with Martin Archer - and ad hoc groups. He played Derek Bailey’s Company Week in 1988 and was a member of Sonny Simmons’ UK Quartet + Linda Sharrock's ensembles.
He went on to play many concerts in UK, mainland Europe and North America both as a soloist and with various ad hoc ensembles (with, for example, LaDonna Smith, Davey Williams, Paul Lytton, Louis Moholo, Jeffrey Morgan, Erhard Hirt).
Theodora Laird is a multidisciplinary artist, songwriter and producer. She has released several EPs under the moniker ‘feeo’ - including most recently ‘run over’, made with support from the PRS Foundation’s ‘Women Make Music’ fund. As a vocalist she has appeared on projects such as Loraine James’ Hyperdub release ‘For You And I’ and she regularly contributes to the ‘Grain’ residency as an improviser.
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.
Dr John McGrath is an Irish guitarist, writer and educator based in London.
His music explores the boundaries of the ancient and modern as traditional elements meet improvisation and experimental tendencies. McGrath's compositions (available from Crooked Stem Recordings) have been featured in The Wire, RTE Radio 1, BBC Radio, aired on several television programmes, and sounded at Tate Modern and FACT.
A professional guitarist from the age of 17, John has performed thousands of gigs including in ensembles with Dustin Wong, Sharon Gal, Cavalier Song, History of Harry, Black Snow Rodeo, Tequila Sunrise, Rhys Chatham, Howard Skempton and the aPAtT Orchestra. Recent session work includes two records with The Unattached (Gare du Nord). McGrath has been commissioned to write for the IMMIX ensemble and performed new music alongside large arrangements of his work with the group. As a solo performer John has performed at various festivals and has supported Richard Dawson, Gwenifer Raymond, Laraaji and Sun Araw. Recent appearances include a solo set at King's Place, London.
He is co-editor of the collection 21st Century Guitar for Bloomsbury (2023) and is currently working with Alan F. Moore on a monograph about English Folk Song.
I'm an artist and musician based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
The visual art and the music I make are related to one another. I'm interested in the nuances and contradictions which ostensibly opposing organising principles and perceptual paradigms can generate in relation to each other.
I play mostly contemporary experimental music, often improvised and primarily on the viola and (sometimes tabletop) guitar. I also play Swedish and Norwegian traditional dance music on the fiddle. I have performed and recorded in the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden and Slovenia, and have played in regular groups with Tapiwa Svosve, Silvan Schmid, Eddie Prévost, Angharad Davies, Hannah Marshall, Sarah Farmer, Jorge Boehringer, Andrew Woodhead, Phil Durrant, Samuel Rodgers, Joe Wright, James Opstad, Mark Sanders, Rachel Musson, Xhosa Cole and James Malone. With Tapiwa Svosve I also co-run the label Physical Correlate
Caius Williams is an improviser, bassist, and composer from London with a varied practice including improvised music, electronic music, and projects exploring experimental approaches to composition. Some current collaborative/supportive roles include a duo project with guitarist Tara Cunningham, and recently working in ‘Lifetones’: a project led by Charles Bullen of ‘This Heat’. He has been running and curating the ‘Grain’ residency at Avalon Cafe in Bermondsey. His debut album ‘Gwannach’ is out now via Cafe Oto’s OTOROKU.
