Monday 8 April 2024, 7.30pm
Sven-Åke Johansson, born in 1943 in Mariestad (Sweden), is one of the style-defining drummers of the German free jazz era of the 60s and 70s. From the 80s onwards, he pursued an artistic path largely independent of institutions and groups as a music performer in the circles of fine arts and new music. Among other things, more than fifty record releases, a number of music theater pieces, radio plays, pictorial works and a lively touring life are among his oeuvre.
"It’s hard to know where to begin with percussionist and polymath Sven-Åke Johansson: Is he a bebopdrummer? A visual artist? A Fluxus-style madman? Actually he’s all of the above and more, and over the decades he’s never confined himself to any single approach or discipline. Like many early exponents of European free jazz–he appears on key recordings by Peter Brötzmann, Manfred Schoof, and the Globe Unity Orchestra, among others–Johansson is rooted in bebop, and he’s continued to carry the torch in bands with adventurous musicians half his age." – Peter Margasak
For a number of years now, energetic double bassist, filmmaker and producer Grip has played an important role for the new scenes of improvised music in Europe. As founder of Umlaut Records, he opened up for creative forms of organizing collectives of musicians and promoting their music internationally. Since 2003 he has been one of the main organizers of Hagenfesten in Dala-Floda, Sweden, a stand-alone festival, and quite frankly possibly the most pleasant venue for free improvised music not only in Sweden but in the whole of Europe. Few other places offer quite the same endearing combination of sophisticated musical risk-taking, and up-beat, social get-together. Grip’s musicianship is informed by a similar knack for welding musical sophistication with social communication, often with an analog film camera at hand. With a handful of short films Joel Grip met mexican filmmaker Mauricio Hernández and shortly the film production company Umlicht was established. They are right now working on their second feature film together.
www.joelgrip.com / www.umlicht.com
Pierre Borel is a saxophonist and composer, working in the field of improvised and experimental music. Since 2006 he is residing in Berlin taking part of the high flow of ongoing creativity that is centered there. He has performed in most european countries, Japan, Russia and USA and is a regular playmate of Joel Grip, Hannes Lingens, Derek Shirley, Christian Lillinger, Axel Dörner, Tobias Delius to name a few.
He obtained a master degree at the Jazz Institute in Berlin in 2008, and continues questioning sound and composition through his studies in electro-acoustic music.
Together with Florian Bergmann and Hannes Lingens, he was running the Umlaut Berlin collective that in recent years released a great number of records and organized four festivals of improvised music.
Seymour Wright is a saxophonist. His work is about the creative, situated friction of learning, ideas, people and the saxophone – music, history and technique – actual and potential.
Seymour's solo music is documented on three widely-acclaimed collections - Seymour Wright of Derby (2008), Seymour Writes Back (2015) and Is This Right? (2017).
Current projects include: @xcrswx with Crystabel Riley; abaria with Ute Kanngiesser; [Ahmed] with Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip and Pat Thomas; GUO with Daniel Blumberg; XT with Paul Abbott; The Creaking Breeze Ensemble; a trans-atlantic duet with Andy Guthrie, and, with Jean-luc Guionnet a project addressing an imaginary lacunae in Aby Warburg's Atlas Mnemosyne.
@xcrswx
