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Chris Burn

Following education at Surrey University where he studied composition with Reginald Smith Brindle, Sebastian Forbes and Robin Maconie, Chis Burn became involved in free improvisation and a commitment to this way of working has stayed with him throughout his career. He considers all his compositional work to be informed by his experiences in this area of contemporary music making. His group Ensemble, an octet of improvising musicians whose work embraces some aspects of composition has performed at many European festivals and broadcast on radio and television. He is also known for his performances of the piano music of Henry Cowell (writing a documentary for BBC Radio 3 about Cowell's music in 1995), John Cage and other contemporary composers, sometimes including compositions and improvisations in the same concert.

John Butcher

John Butcher began by playing conventional jazz at University but quickly converted to a freer approach. He has taken the concern with the manipulation of multiphonics (split tones and false notes) bequeathed by earlier improvisers such as Evan Parker in new directions increasingly focusing on creating rich, slowly-changing strata of sounds (layers of hums, buzzes and brittle metallic noises) which he often combines with snatches of pure melody. Apart from being an internationally much sought after musician, playing in a variety of contexts, he also leads his own group which debuted with a commissioned piece at The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2008. From 1993 - 1997 Butcher was a director of the London Musicians´ Collective, helping to organise their annual festivals and also organising, with flautist Nancy Ruffer, two SoundArt festivals - programming contemporary composed and improvised music.

He gives many workshops/lectures/master-classes on improvisation and the saxophone at amongst others: The Royal Academy of Music, Vancouver Creative Music Institute, Barcelona Conservatory, Newfoundland Sound Symposium, Middlesex University, Princeton University, Parthenay Festival, Dartington College, Stanford University etc.

Tania Chen

A concert pianist and free improviser Tania Chen has performed solo in the UK, Japan, Europe and USA, playing the music of experimental composers including John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and Cornelius Cardew and premiering piano works by contemporary composers such as Michael Parsons and Andrew Poppy.

Tania Chen has worked with film makers such as Jayne Parker and in May 2007 she performed alongside Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars in the Tate Modern "Sleep" all night event in the Turbine Hall, playing Satie´s ‘Vexations’, accompanied by a screening of Andy Warhol´s film ‘Sleep’.

She is equally well known for her passion for free and experimental jazz improvisation and has worked regularly with musicians such as Steve Beresford, Mark Sanders, John Edwards, David Ryan, and Shabaka Hutchings within the European free improvising scene.

Awarded a place at the Royal College of Music as a BMus student, Tania has an MMus 1st Class Distinction from Goldsmiths College having studied with pianists John Tilbury and Stephen Coombs. She has recorded for Radio 3, Resonance FM, worked commercially for films, and has a growing number of releases on iTunes.

Günter Christmann

This ‘Polish-born master of the avant-garde trombone’ got into improvising through early jazz music and has proved to be a major influence on many improvising trombonists inspired by his fluid use of extended playing techniques. Not only a trombone virtuoso his unique creative vision and contribution to improvised music in leading his own Vario groups, running an independent label and organising an annual series of concerts in his home town of Hannover have served to inspire musicians from around the world. Since the late 60’s Gunter has played with a veritable who’s who of the international improvising community.

Lol Coxhill

Soprano saxophone maestro Lol Coxhill has played with everyone from Rufus Thomas to Derek Bailey. His approach to the saxophone at the start of his career was entirely conventional but by the close of the 1960s he had developed a distinctive, unrestrained style that he could somehow integrate into any musical setting with which he was working.

Throughout the 1970s the saxophonist moved further into free improvisaton, establishing himself as a dynamic solo performer in addition to working with ensembles such as Derek Bailey's Company, The Spontaneous Music Ensemble and groups such as The Melody Four, The Dedication Orchestra, AMM,and his own group The Recedents, as well as his continuing solo and duo efforts. Frog Dance, a documentary film about the saxophonist, was broadcast in the U.K. in 1986. The decade also saw Coxhill establishing a parallel career as an actor, appearing in stage (with The Welfare State) and televison productions (including the British series Strangers, 1978) before moving on to film roles (London Story, 1980; Caravaggio,1986; Orlando, 1992).

He continues to surprise and delight audiences with his original and inventive playing.

Dominic Lash

Dominic Lash is active in musical genres from jazz to funk to rock. Free improvisation is his central focus; he performs regularly with a variety of stable and more ad hoc groupings in Oxford and London, as well as playing a major role in the administration of Oxford Improvisers, Oxford's free improvisation and experimental music collective. As a composer, his main project is an ongoing modular work blurring boundaries between improvisation and composition entitled Representations.

"dextrous bass playing teems with energy" - Nightshift
"endless efforts to veer left of every known note or chord" - Newcastle Journal
"free-bass don", "stunning" - Time Out
"explosive" - The Guardian
"His range is just about unrivalled" - The Watchful Ear

John Russell

John Russell began playing the guitar in 1965, playing free improvisation in and around London from 1972 onwards. From 1974 his work extended into teaching, broadcasts (radio and television) and touring both in the UK and abroad. In 1981 he founded ‘Quaqua’, a changing bank of improvisors put together in different permutations for specific events, with which he still performs. In 1987 he helped set up Acta records with John Butcher and Phil Durrant and in the late 80´s he inaugurated, and is the driving force behind, ‘Mopomoso’ which has become London´s longest running concert series dedicated to free improvisation. Apart from solo work he is currently involved in a number of regular groups including: the Evan Parker acoustic trio, duos with Henry Lowther, Stefan Keune and Phil Minton, a trio with Michel Doneda and Roger Turner, The Garden Gift Quartet and projects with master percussionist Sabu Toyozumi.

Akio Suzuki

Akio Suzuki is known as a pioneer of sound art, but the breadth of his activities and the form of his works far exceeds the normal boundaries of sound art. It is perhaps more as a "quester after sound and space" that he has received the most attention from artists in many fields. Since his first performance in 1963 he has tirelessly studied the nature of sound and listening, designing and building his own instruments, creating installations and also playing iwabue - ancient and naturally-sculpted stone flutes which have been handed down in Suzuki´s family. Major exhibitions and performances have included Documenta 8 (Kassel), Festival d′Automne (Paris), Stadtgallerie Saarbrucken, Daad Gallerie (Berlin) and SOAS (London).

Sabu Toyozumi

Drummer Sabu Toyozumi began his professional career in 1967 playing with the Samurais and appearing at festivals alongside rock groups such as Pink Floyd, Ten Years After and Led Zeppelin. He started working in free improvisation in 1970 and joined the AACM in Chicago in 1972. There followed a period of travel and he established his own group Sabu Unit in 1976. In 1979 he formed a duo with Kaoru Abe and from 1985 began touring in Africa, Europe, the Middle and Far East, India, Nepal, Mongolia, Korea and Burma.

Since 1987 he has worked with many European musicians in Japan including Paul Rutherford, Derek Bailey, Sonny Murray and Misha Mengelberg. In 2001 he began working in a duo with Takehisha Kosugi. He has also worked with (amongst others) Fred Frith, Wadada Leo Smith, Harri Sjostrom, Ute Wasserman, Lol Coxhill and Veryan Weston.

Phillipp Wachsmann

Phillipp Wachsmann came to free improvisation from a predominantly classical background, particularly via the contemporary experiments of "indeterminacy, graphic and prose-based scores, conceptualism and electroacoustics, listening to Webern, Partch, Ives, Berio and Varèse, reading ‘Die Reihe’ and interrogating the rhythmic, harmonic and melodic preoccupations of Western art music. Starting in 1969, Wachsmann was a member of Yggdrasil, an ensemble performing works by Cage, Cardew, Feldman, Ashley and others and in this group he used contact mikes on the violin and made his own electronic instruments, ring modulators and routing devices. Ironically, his studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris (1969-1970) pushed him hard in the direction of free music. He recalls: ‘Despite her neoclassical orientation, her insistence that composition is about the imagination of performance and its realisation, the live moment, and her stunning ability to make this happen was a powerful influence on me, steering towards ‘performance’ and therefore ‘improvisation’.’"

Phillip Wachsmann has performed and/or recorded with: Tony Oxley´s Celebration Orchestra, Derek Bailey´s Company, Georg Graewe, Barry Guy, Iskra 1903, King Übü Orchestrü, London Jazz Composers´ Orchestra, Evan Parker, Quintet Moderne; Fred Van Hove´s ML DD 4, Rüdiger Carl´s COWWS (now CPWWS) Quintet; and Lines, with Martin Blume, Jim Denley, Axel Dörner and Marcio Mattos. He also plays as a solo musician and administers Bead Records.

Alex Ward

Born in 1974 Alex Ward began learning piano and clarinet at the ages of 5 and 9 respectively. The presence of a copy of Ornette Coleman´s "This Is Our Music" in his parents´ led him to investigate subsequent developments from jazz, including free improvisation and as a result of this interest, he went on a summer course on improvisation run by Community Music in 1986, where he met Derek Bailey, who invited him to play at various events including Company Weeks in 1988, 1990 and 1994. Bailey also organised the recording and release in 1991 of his first CD, a duet with percussionist Steve Noble, "Ya Boo, Reel and Rumble". In 1992, he went to Oxford to study music, and began playing with the various improvisers based there and has continued to work with countless improvisers as well as playing guitar and leading his own Rock group ‘The Dead Ends’.

Ute Wassermann

Vocal artist Ute Wassermann is a composer/ performer, improviser and interpreter of contemporary music. She studied at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts, specializing in sound installation and vocal performance, and studied classical singing with Carol Plantamura (San Diego) and Arnold van Mill (Hamburg). Since 1984 she has developed many special multivoiced vocal techniques, catalogued by register, timbre and articulative sequences, which may be deconstructed and/or superimposed and used to explore spatial resonance phenomena. She has given numerous performances of her own solo work and performs regularly with many improvising musicians, including duos with Richard Barrett (live electronics) and Matthias Kaul (percussion), in venues ranging from international festivals to lofts. She has collaborated frequently with composers who have created works especially for her voice, including Henning Christiansen, Richard Barrett, Chaya Czernowin, Hans-Joachim Hespos, Sven Åke Johansson, Michael Finnissy, Ana Maria Rodriguez. She has performed music theatre works by Chaya Czernowin, Salvatore Sciarrino, Matthias Kaul among others. She has performed with many ensembles and orchestras including ASKO, Elision, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, Münchener Kammerorchester, Radiosymphomieorchester Wien in festivals like Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik, Münchener Biennale, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Archipel Festival Genf, Tokyo Summer Festival, Festival of Vision Hongkong, Ars Musica, Festival of Perth, Pro Musica Nova, Wien Modern... . Ute Wassermann is a member of the Berlin-based composition/performance collective ‘les femmes savantes’.

Admission

Three day pass: £24 - One day pass: £12 /£8 concessions

Bookings: +44(0)20 7254 4097

Doors open 20:00h

The Vortex

11 Gillett Square, London N16 8JH [Directions]
(Nearest train station Dalston Kingsland)