A night of music celebrating the launch of Making Friends by Or Sobre Blau (Ubaldo and Kiran Leonard). Featuring John Edwards and Daniel Thompson (duo) and Luke Cowan.
Doors 7pm
Tickets £10-14
Andreu G. Serra (Ubaldo) and Kiran Leonard are guitarists and good friends. They met nine years ago, having moved to Lisbon within a couple of weeks of each other by pure chance. While living together in a large, horrible warehouse in Alto São João, they recorded a set of improvisations later released as The Piri Piri Samplers (Memorials of Distinction, 2019), which captured the duo's distinct yet complementary approaches to their instrument: Serra's rasping, wildly idiosyncratic lead lines spilling over looping beds of tape manipulation and ebow, and Leonard's contrastingly traditional, no-pedals counterpoint. They played one show at an art gallery, both left Lisbon before the end of the summer, and did not live in the same country again for almost a decade.
Making Friends is a record about its own making: a reflection on a decade of friendship, on the importance of friend and family bonds (the song Rachel & Antonia is named for, and excerpts phone conversations with, both members' mothers), and the duo's shared, irrepressible, inexplicable need to play and record music with others. The duo begins the record distant and confused -- the first track Campanilleros records their agonising attempts to remember how to play music and communicate together (Leonard realises he has more or less forgotten how to speak Spanish) -- and they end closer and stronger both as friends and collaborators; sharing, as Serra remarks on the final track La invitació de l'anguila (the Eel's Invitation), "molta il.lusió per lo que pogué vindre" or "much excitement for what may lie ahead".
John Edwards grew up in London and started experimenting with the bass guitar before he switched in his twenties to play double bass. He is deeply rooted in the creative free jazz and improvisation genre. Since the 80ties he is as soloist and in many groups and ensembles in Europe active and became one of the most renowned bass players. He played/plays regular for example with Peter Brötzmann, Joe McPhee, Phil Minton, Maggie Nichols, Evan Parker, Roscoe Michtell, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Mark Sanders, Caroline Kraabel, John Butcher, Pat Thomas, Irène Schweizer, Hans Koch, Florian Stoffner, Gabriele Mitelli, John Dikeman.
"I think John Edwards is absolutely remarkable: there’s never been anything like him before, anywhere in jazz."
- Richard Williams, The Blue Moment
Daniel Thompson was born in Norfolk, England. Largely self-taught, he moved to London in 2005 and studied with the guitarist John Russell for two years. Since then, he has performed at many venues and festivals across the UK and Europe. In addition, he has also been organising concerts including the The Shoreditch Church Concert Series with Benedict Taylor.
Currently you can hear and see Daniel performing solo, with other musicians in many ad-hoc improvising situations and in long-term collaborations or 'working groups'. Recent collaborations include performances and/or recordings with Neil Metcalfe, Steve Noble, Caroline Kraabel, Max Reed, John Edwards, Benedict Taylor, Tom Jackson, Vid Drasler, Evan Parker, Adam Bohman, Sue Lynch, Alex Ward, Kay Grant, Roland Ramanan, Adrian Northover, Marcello Magliocchi, Alan Wilkinson, Colin Webster amongst others.
Daniel is the founder and artistic director of 'Empty Birdcage Records', a label dedicated to releasing documents of free improvisation. emptybirdcagerecords.bandcamp.com
Luke Cowan is a composer and musician based in London. He has self-released a small collection of enviro-ambient works which are deeply imbued with the geography and atmosphere of the fenland landscape in which he grew up. Various configurations of piano, strings, brass and reeds form the basis of his arrangements, which are woven also with the sounds of non-traditional instruments such as pinecones, spoons, wine glasses and handfuls of grains. This open approach to arrangement, combined with a vérité approach to recording, gives his music an undeniable pastoral quality, as well as a certain vitality. Improvisation is central to Luke's creative process, and in his work he seeks to strike a balance between the preconceived and the spontaneous.