HEAVEYWEIGHTS INCOMING!!
We’re delighted and honoured to host this matinee performance featuring some of our favourite UK improvisers – genuine world class musicians. John Edwards’ bass playing is utterly magical and Alex Ward is a legend who’s played with an A to Z of the greatest free improv players of the last couple of decades. Mike Gennaro is new to us but if he’s playing with these two he’s bound to be cut from the same talented cloth!! What a treat!!
“The wordless, direct rhetoric of this conversation, as unbound as it is coherent, also bears witness to a lightning-like grasp and extraordinary intimacy.” – Martin Schray, Free Jazz Blog
John Edwards / double bass
Mike Gennaro / drums, percussion
Alex Ward / clarinet & guitar
John Edwards
John Edwards is a true virtuoso whose staggering range of techniques and boundless musical imagination have redefined the possibility of the double bass and dramatically expanded its role, whether playing solo or with others. Perpetually in demand, he has played with Evan Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Sunny Murray, Derek Bailey, Joe McPhee, Lol Coxhill, Louis Moholo, Peter Brötzmann, Mulatu Astatke, Jonny Greenwood and countless others.
“I think John Edwards is absolutely remarkable: there’s never been anything like him before, anywhere in jazz.” – Richard Williams, The Blue Moment
Alex Ward
Alex Ward’s diverse musical activities since the early ’90s have straddled the worlds of free improvisation, contemporary composition and avant rock, and have seen him work with such significant musical figures as Derek Bailey, Duck Baker, Lol Coxhill, Eugene Chadbourne, Simon H. Fell, Thurston Moore, Joe Morris, Steve Noble, Evan Parker, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Pat Thomas and Weasel Walter, amongst a host of others.
“...guitarist Alex Ward [is] a compulsively creative polymath… a reliably unpredictable axe-hero for collaborators of all backgrounds.” – Stewart Lee, The Sunday Times Review
Mike Gennaro
Drummer Mike Gennaro burst into improvised music circles in 1999 with the release Port Huron Picnic (Spool), a disc with lauded Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. Then still in his early twenties, Gennaro also made two appearances at the Toronto Jazz Festival, duetting with trailblazing saxophonist John Butcher.
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Plus support TBA and The Wildcard Quartet