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1 | Spanish Fighters | 37:12 |
2012 recording of AMM duo Prévost & Tilbury at Slovenia's Španski Borci. Surely both artists felt a certain respect playing in a place with references to the Spanish Civil War and no doubt it influences their playing here. Sparse and heavy.
"John Tilbury’s piano playing is quiet yet emphatic, the notes suspended and widely spaced. Eddie Prévost’s cymbals and bass drum skin moan and shimmer, apt but never obvious. Like an atom, it is mostly empty, but filled with potential power. Prévost and Tilbury’s freely improvised dialogue carries on an episodic discussion that has gone on since the days of Swinging London, sometimes restive, sometimes terribly fractured, and now spare and unerringly right. They police themselves, never imposing like the fascists that the Spanish fighters resisted." – Bill Meyer, January 2016
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John Tilbury / piano
Eddie Prévost / percussion
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Recorded by Izack Zupan at the festival Neposlusno (Sound Disobedience) in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2012. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux. Artwork by Myah Chen.
A founder-member of AMM (1965-2022)
“[Eddie Prévost’s] is one of the greatest metallurgists that music has produced. […] sparks delicately arcing through the air, of slow lava ingesting its surroundings, of the shifting grind of tectonic plates across each other, of the rustle and glint of a firebird darting between shadows, and of ore smashing into the surface of the earth; but perhaps this language is overwrought: all that needs to be remarked upon is Prévost's industry, his diligence.”
Nathan Moore — liner note to AMM’s ‘Indúsria’
Matchless Recordings mrcd105.
But beyond this work Prévost has also maintained a relationship with the jazz drum-kit.
“His free drumming flows superbly making perfect use of his formidable technique, but his most startling feature is his stylelessness. It’s as though there has never been an Elvin Jones or a Max Roach.” - review of a set with saxophonist Lou Gare, Melody Maker (27.03.1975)
“Prévost, meanwhile, was simply miraculous; it was fascinating to watch him and to compare his approach with that of a Kern or a Nilssen-Love. I can only say that he was possessed of an uncanny, burning intentness that navigated the ensemble through passages of stark, sculpted beauty, grave concentration and full-on, bristling energy.”
Blue Tomato, Vienna 2012. In concert with Marilyn Crispell and Harrison Smith. Richard Rees-Jones
“An excellent release from one of the finest percussionists around, jazz or otherwise.” review of Prévost’s solo CD ‘Collider’
Matchless Recordings mrcd106 – Brian Olewnic, Squidsear (2022).
“Relentlessly innovative yet full of swing and fire.” – Morning Star
John Tilbury is renowned for his peerless interpretation of the piano music of Morton Feldman, John Cage, Christian Wolff and Howard Skempton. In addition to the performances and seminal recordings that he has made of these composers’ works, he has been an eloquent advocate of their music in his writing and speaking about them. The same is true of the attention he has paid to the music and ideas of Cornelius Cardew, the subject of his authoritative biography published in 2008, and with whom he played in the legendary improvisation groups the Scratch Orchestra and AMM. In the last ten years John Tilbury has performed a range of plays and prose pieces by Samuel Beckett.
Video by Helen Petts
