Tag: recycle collective

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it's all about the lovely peoples

This being a musician thing, it’s really all about lovely people. I love playing music, I love being a musician, I love recording and releasing music and I love doing gigs. And the thing I love about all of those the most is that I get to do it in the company of lovely people.

I’ve mentioned before on here that I’m continually delighted to find that the people who come to see me play are by and large the kind of people I’d like to go for a curry with – and fairly regularly do end up friends with them, on more than just an ego-massaging ‘hey how great, you like my tunes’ kind of way. I’ve somehow managed to write music that attracts nice people. This is a good thing.

Likewise the musicians that I spend my life playing with are lovely. Jez and Theo, they of the duo albums on Pillow Mountain Records, are two of my most favouritest people to spend time with. Delightful, friendly, funny, generous people, who also happen to be fabulous musicians.

The amassed hordes of the Recycle Collective are just great – Cleveland, BJ, Orphy, Leo, Andrea, Julie, Seb, Andy, Patrick etc. etc… great people one and all. I’m a lucky man.

Today I spent the day with Evelyn Glennie – genius percussionist, and of course, an utterly delightful person. Evelyn’s always been a very progressive force within classical music, experimenting with improvised music, processed sound and MIDI instruments for years, and I was up showing her more about looping, exploring the possibilities for her percussive set up. With a musician that good, and that open minded, she’s bound to discover all manner of gorgeous music in the midst of the technology, and hopefully we’ll get to do some things together as it progresses. But more than the music, I’m just delighted that once again being a musician has put me in contact with more lovely people. I is feelin’ blessed.

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None More Prog




The Tangent

Originally uploaded by solobasssteve.

Went to Southend to see Theo playing with The Tangent last night. For those of you that don’t know (I’m guessing that’s most of you), The Tangent are a prog rock band, in the old fashioned sense of mini-moogs and obscure time signature changes, too many band members and 22 minute songs. Andy Tillison, who basically IS the Tangent, is a driven man, and I have a huge amount of respect for him, bordering on awe, mixed with bewilderment… That his musical vision requires him to hire six other musicians, write this insanely complex music and play it in little clubs in Southend is a remarkable testament to his tenacity and dedication.

And it is very well played. Despite a number of nasty technical hitches (an electrical spike that shut down all the keyboards and synth stuff), the band played the ridiculously complex music very well indeed, especially considering this isn’t a band that gigs week in week out (three of them are over from Sweden for the gig), and there are moments in the gig when I’m reminded why I loved prog-rock so much in my teens – the complexity, energy, the bizarreness of grooves in 7/8, 11/8 etc – it doesn’t really sound like anything else.

But I also breathed a huge sigh of relief that I’m not destined for the kind of logistical hell that Andy is every time he puts on a gig. My own musical goals in life are scalable to the degree that I could play solo in people’s living rooms for the rest of my music life and be not only fulfilled but probably make a reasonable living doing it.

I’m rarely at the mercy of club sound engineers and sysyems built to make Stones tribute bands sound loud, not 7 progsters sound clear. Even when I add other musicians, there are never any scores to hand round, rehearsals to be hand (except the duo with Julie, and that actually made a nice change, to have things to remember for once!)

My own musical journey is one deeper into collective spontaneous composition – beyond what usually gets described as ‘free improv’ and into something where ‘Is it Good?’ is the question of the hour not ‘Is it Right?’ – it’s what the Recycle Collective is about, it’s what the duos with Theo and BJ and Cleveland are about, it’s where I’m happiest, and where I play best.

So, a salute to Andy Tillison for his remarkable tenacity in the face of unrelenting technical obstacles, and a prayer of thanks that the musical monkey on my own back isn’t quite so demanding.

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Another great day at Greenbelt

It’s was a fabulous day at Greenbelt on Sunday – I wasn’t scheduled to play, but did a couple of poetry and bass things with Steve Stockman, which was much fun.

Two great moments to day – Nizlopi on the mainstage were outstanding. If you get the chance to see them on their upcoming tour, don’t miss it. John’s an amazing bassist – to play like that and beatbox at the same time is remarkable, and for any of you BassMonkeys reading, it’s unmissable. Go and see it!

Great moment number 2 was Jude Simpson’s gig – jude is an amazing performer. She’s a performance poet, comedy songwriter and weaver of rambling spontaneous tales and stories from her life. She was in a tent that held 450 people, with at least as many again outside – they had to take the sides down, and she had the entire crowd rapt. You may remember she guested on my last night at Edinburgh last year, and was brilliant then. Go and see her if she’s gigging near you – I’ll book her for the Recycle Collective soon…

And now it’s Monday, last day, and we’ve got loads to do – have got keyboard sorted out for the gig, am compering this afternoon for a couple of shows, and then getting ready for the recycle collective show tonight. And somewhere in there i’ve got to pack up the tent, and get the car loaded so TSP and I can get back to London late night tonight, so that I’ll be ready for tomorrow’s gig at the National Theatre Foyer! Busybusy…

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Greenbelt gig with Julie

Tonight’s Greenbelt gig with Julie went well – playing in the Winged Ox to a pretty packed venue, we played pretty well, though obviously not with the sharpness we had in Edinburgh. Because of Julie having lost her voice during the week, we dropped the key of ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ which made it slightly odd to play, but we got through it OK, and Julie sang really well considering her sore throat.

A great preparation for the big Recycle Collective gig on Monday! Yay!

Greenbelt on the whole is going superbly well – catching up with many many many lovely friends, meeting fascinating new peoples, eating delicious food, going to the occasional seminar or gig, and generally having a fantastic time. Double Yay! This is definitely the the best weekend of the year…

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More magical recycling…

It’s becoming a bit predictable – Recycle Collective rolls around towards the back half of each month, and an evening of fabulous creative exciting music ensues.

Audience sizes are less easy to predict, but August is a tough month for playing anything other than festivals in the UK, so I was actually quite happy with our modest gathering of lovely Recyclettes.

We went with the three set/three curators model of Recycling – starting with me playing a couple of solo tunes (Behind Every Word and MMFSOG for those taking notes) and then inviting Andy Hamill up for some bass duets, he on upright, me on fretless, that came out beautifully. Andy’s been playing with Natasha Atlas, and he fed a gorgeous middle eastern melody into one of the improvs.

We then got Seb up to join us on drums, and I looped his drums, and anything else that happened to end up being picked up by the mic over his kit! Much fun indeed, some great noises and great moments.

Second set was Andy’s to curate, and he started it off with a lovely solo piece for looped bass and harmonica, followed by a duet with violinist Julian Ferraretto, who also sang beautifully on Nature Boy – yup, proper jazz at the Recycle Collective! They did another standard after that, My Romance, with Seb on drums, and played it really well – Andy’s chordal comping on the upright was just amazing. Fab stuff.

I then joined them for a quartet improv piece, which started off with a violin and bass loop and spiralled out from there. Such a treat to play with such marvellous musicians.

Seb’s set – the final one of the evening – started with him playing his first ever solo drum piece. Always nice to have firsts at the RC, especially when they’re as good as this. I then went up and we started what was to be about a 20 minute abstract piece that began with me looping his drums, replacing bits of the loop, flipping it back to front and adding some scary elephant noises and spookiness, then moving to a filtered faux-tabla rhythmic thing before andy joined us, and finally Julian and another violinist, Mandy Drummond piled in for a very dark atmospheric finish, with andy playing a sparse groove, seb scattering percussive sounds all over the place and the two violins adding violin loveliness to it all.

All in all, a fab night’s music. Some truly amazing moments and a fascinating journey through a new musical landscape, as well as the first ting-ting te-ting jazz at the RC.

Here’s hope the Bass/Bass/Drums trio happens again very soon!

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Preparation for tonight's gig…

Just getting sorted for tonight’s Recycle Collective gig. I’ve not done an improv gig with a drummer for ages… probably since I last played with Seb Rochford, in Brighton! So that’ll be fun – I’m hoping we can find a way to mic the kit and loop the drums as well, but even if we can’t, it’s going to be so much fun.

Andy Hamill is threatening to bring a harmonica and do a couple of solo things with bass and harp, which is going to be great – these gigs have become such an oasis of relentless creativity and fun in each month for me, I really look forward to them.

If you’re in London, please come down!

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Leo Abrahams – Scene Memory

Picked up Leo Abrahams’ new CD, ‘Scene Memory’ at his gig the other night, and have been listening to it today. It’s quite a different affair from his first album, Honeytrap, which is all big melodies and involved chord progressions. This one is much more ambient – loads of really heavily filtered delay sounds on his guitar and gorgeous lush pads, through which Leo weaves his melodies is a less obvious way than before. Both albums are really beautiful, and it’s great to hear the tracks on the CD sound pretty close to the way he plays them live – I don’t know of each track on the CD is a single live performance, but it sounds like it.

If you like what I do, you REALLY ought to check out Leo’s stuff. He’s an amazing musician ,and gorgeous composer, and he’s doing the Recycle Collective on the 20th of September. Be there!

leoabrahams.com
myspace.com/leoabrahams

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Leo Abrahams gig

Went to see Leo Abrahams play last night – Leo’s an amazing guitarist and composer, who did the Recycle Collective a couple of months back, and is back with us again in September, and last night was playing at The Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell, not far at all from Darbucka, at a night called the Electro Acoustic Club.

He played a few tunes I’d heard before from his first solo album HoneyTrap, and some new stuff from his brand new album, Scene Memory, which were really really lovely. He’s using lots of really gorgeous filtered sounds on his guitar on the new stuff – anyone who likes what I do will love Leo’s music, for sure. So head over to his MySpace Page to hear some, then buy the CDs.

Go on, off you go!

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