This Wednesday 15th May, I’m playing in a trio with Tullis Rennie and Otto Willberg at SET in Dalston. It’s the second gig for this group, which originally got together last year for a gig at Liz Exell’s Jazz Herstory series at Poplar Union. I’m looking forward to playing together again! Otto and I collaborateid on this nice photo flyer (?!) for the occasion…
A nice gig coming up: on Saturday 11th May I’m playing in a quartet with Charlotte Keeffe, Benedict Taylor and Alex Ward at Hundred Years Gallery. This group will be a visiting ensemble at City University the week before, playing for a workshop with the composition students, so this concert will be a nice opportunity to make music together in a live setting. Timings and more about the musicians are on the Hundred Years Gallery website. Quite pleased with my flyer for this one!
Colin, Tom and I have booked in three more dates for our residency at weterintobeer in Brockley….see you in the beer shop!
At the end of the month I’m heading to Switzerland on tour with the newly-named MoonMot sextet. This group originally came out of a LUME collaboration with Jazzwerkstatt Bern in 2017, featuring UK and Swiss musicians and playing the music of our LUME quartet project Word Of Moth. The UK/CH ensemble has now taken on its own identity and has a recording session and tour lined up, all masterminded by trombone player Simon Petermann. The dates:
27 March – Lucerne: Neustahl
28 March – Shaffhausen: Haberhaus
29 March – Solothurn: Kreuz Kultur
30 March – Bern: BeJazz
1 April – Lugano: Studio Foce
2 April – Zurich: Falcone Sounds
And the personnel:
Simon Petermann – trombone
Dee Byrne – alto saxophone
Cath Roberts – baritone saxophone
Oli Kuster – piano/keyboards
Seth Bennett – double bass
Johnny Hunter – drums
A video has surfaced, on the Mopomoso YouTube channel, of my set with Alex Ward last September. The whole thing is here – I remember it being pretty full-on and a lot of fun!
Sloth Racket is sharing the bill with Dee Byrne’s excellent band Entropi for the first time on Wednesday 13th March, for a special LUME double bill concert at Kings Place. LUME has been taking some time off since our second festival in summer 2017, so it will be great to host our first event in a while at a totally new venue for us.
On Sunday 24th February the trio of Olie Brice, Corey Mwamba and me will play at Hundred Years Gallery. This will be either its second or third gig, and the first one after a long break. With Corey retiring from live performance in March, we thought we should get a date in the diary. Come along for an afternoon of improvised music and a rare last chance to hear this combination of people.
And here’s the poster…
The second video from our Vortex gig in September last year: another audience-eye view, and this time it’s ‘A Glorious Monster’. I made this one black and white and I’m kind of into it!
Madwort’s Menagerie is Tom Ward’s chamber-ish sextet project, which I became a member of relatively recently. We recorded a set of Tom’s music in 2017 and the album is coming out this Spring on his new label Madwort Records. To celebrate the release, we’ll be playing at Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton on Saturday 9th February. For this date the lineup will be:
Tom Ward – flute
Alex Bonney – cornet
Adam Spiers – cello
Andrew Woolf – bass clarinet
Cath Roberts – baritone saxophone
Tim Fairhall – double bass
The latest incarnation of the band VOLE, led by Roland Ramanan (trumpet) and Roberto Sassi (guitar), will play its first gig at SETspace in Dalston on Wednesday 16th January. I’m on baritone sax, and the lineup now has added Colin Webster (alto sax) and Andrew Lisle (drums). After a lot of rehearsal, it will be great to play Roland and Roberto’s compositions live with the new band!
