Improvised Duet With Cleveland Watkiss From 2005

Over the last week or so I’ve been thinking about the best way to bring the Recycle Collective back into effect.

A lil’ bit of history – the early part of my ‘solo’ career actually involved a fair bit of collaboration – I did two duet albums – with Jez Carr on piano and Theo Travis on sax/flute, and then in 2005 spent much of the year focused on exploring the collaborative potential of all this looping stuff.

A big part of that was getting together with other musicians, in particular Cleveland Watkiss and BJ Cole, to experiment, try things out, record. It became apparent fairly quickly that what we were doing really ought to be happening in front of an audience, so I put together the first idea for the Recycle Collective – a series of improvised music nights in London, with no prior stylistic constraint.

after a couple of events that were based around solo and duo playing, mostly, I settled on a format of 3 musicians, 3 sets, each set progression solo > duo > trio. So you had each musician playing solo, all 3 possible duo combinations, and 3 loosely curated trio sets… It resulted in some remarkable music and quite a fabulous underground reputation for providing some of the loveliest improvised music in London.

Now that we’re in Birmingham and a little more settled, I’m going to see about bringing it back up here. So here’s a lil’ taster of the kind of thing that happened – it’s an improv duet of Cleveland Watkiss and I, from April 2005 – one of those sessions that inspired me to start the collective:

Gregorian (Steve Lawson and Cleveland Watkiss) by solobasssteve