LUME

So, not sure if I’ve written a proper post about this yet but I’m setting up another new music night in addition to Collisions! This time it’s LUME, which I’ll be running with Dee Byrne. As we wrote in our preview on the London Jazz blog:

Rising from the ashes of ‘Jazz At The Waterline’ and ‘Jazz At The Hackney Cut’, both of which had to fold due to venue closure, LUME will brighten up Thursday nights with a new blend of original and improvised music, starting in July.

Hundred Crows Rising is a relatively new establishment with a healthy appreciation for stuffed crows. On the corner of Chapel Market, the pub has a great upstairs room that we’re excited to adopt as our new space. We’re looking forward to working with Katy, the owner, to establish what will hopefully become a long-running new addition to the roster of London musician-run jazz/improv nights. We’re really chuffed with the location too; five minutes’ walk from Angel tube.

We’ve put together an exciting programme of diverse bands who will be coming to play for us over the next few months, including Esben Tjalve’s Red Kite, Olie Brice Quartet, Liran Donin’s One Thousand Boats, and Tom Ward’s Madwort Sax Quartet. For the opening night on July 4th, we are very happy to be hosting two SE Collective groups: Identity Parade and Redshift.

The listings are starting to come together, and one of the best things so far is we have some fantastic artwork by Peter Beatty, including the angler fish below. Full posters and flyers will be appearing soon!

LUMElowresfish

 

A few new Quadraceratops gigs confirmed, plus MSQ tonight!

After neglecting the blog for a month or so, this is a quick post to announce some upcoming Quadraceratops gigs:

24th June at Jazz In The Round @ The Cockpit, Marylebone. I’m very excited about this one…

1st August at LUME, a(nother) brand new night that I’m setting up with my good friend the sax player Dee Byrne. The gig is upstairs at Hundred Crows Rising, near Angel, in a really nice room where we’ll be hosting great music every Thursday starting July 4th. Should be fun…I’ll do a proper post about LUME soon.

6th October at Jazz at the Union Chapel Bar, a new afternoon gig (3pm) run by the esteemed Mr Andrew Button of The Button Band. This will be the first EVER Quadraceratops afternoon gig!

And finally, just in case anyone reads this post straight after I finish writing it, a reminder that Madwort Sax Quartet is playing TONIGHT at Ryan’s Bar in Stoke Newington!

msqspillkitposter

In League With Robots presents: Collisions

Over the past few months I have spent a lot of time putting together a new project with my drummer friend Dan Paton. We’re launching a live music night in the basement of The Albany, Great Portland St. Every last Tuesday of the month, we will host an exciting double bill of our favourite music from a range of genres, kicking off on May 28th with Raevennan Husbandes & Babelfish. The night will be called Collisions, and our promoter duo name is In League With Robots. The acts for May through to August have all confirmed, and you can check out the listings on the website….see you at the Albany!

MSQ and Spill Kit

I’ve just heard that we have a Madwort Sax Quartet gig booked in for June 5th: a double bill with Chris Dowding’s band Spill Kit, at Ryan’s Bar in Stoke Newington. Get it in the diary! Should be a nice gig…

Quad at The Salisbury

We had a very enjoyable evening at the Salisbury on Sunday. The jazz night there is always well attended so there was a nice crowd, and it was also the first Quadraceratops gig with an open fire. I might work on this as some kind of winter rider requirement: nothing like a fireside chat before going on stage. This gig was also probably our last one with Jason Simpson, who has been playing bass while Dave O’Brien is away travelling. Thanks Jason! And thanks to Jazz @ The Salisbury for having us.

I’m working on some new music for the band at the moment, and also getting into more gig promotion, of which there will be news soon…

‘Hooloovoo’ liner notes

Last year, I was commissioned by the brass quintet Mardi Brass to write a piece for their upcoming album ‘Something New’. The album will be the last in their ‘Something’ series (can you guess what the other records are called?), and will focus on new compositions/arrangements written especially for this project.

I sent over my offering in Autumn, and was excited to hear in February that it has been recorded! The piece is called ‘Hooloovoo’, after a creature from ‘The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy’: it’s a tribute to the late HHGTTG author Douglas Adams, who would have been 60 in 2012. Mardi Brass asked me to write some liner notes/blurb about my contribution, which resulted in the following:

Hooloovoo

In 2012, when I wrote this piece, the late author Douglas Adams would have celebrated his 60th birthday. The occasion was marked with a gig at the Hammersmith Apollo, and when I was asked to write something for Mardi Brass I thought straight away of a ‘blue’ connection that would allow me to make my own tribute. Adams wrote what was probably the most important non-trilogy of books in my childhood, ‘The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy’ series (there are in fact five novels in the ‘trilogy’). I spent many hours happily lost in the fantastical universe of the HHGTTG, with its array of absurd, wonderful characters and places. This is a universe where humans are the lab-rats in a giant experiment presided over by mice, where a cupcake wired to a person’s head can provide a sudden crushing vision of her own insignificance in the cosmos. It is the home of the ‘Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster’, a cocktail the effects of which are described as ‘like having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick’.

 

One of the inhabitants of the HHGTTG universe is the Hooloovoo. Admittedly, it has a small walk-on part at the beginning of the fist book, but it’s a fascinating creature nonetheless: a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue. The Hooloovoo is part of the team responsible for building the starship ‘Heart of Gold’, and we encounter it at the launch ceremony for the ship, ‘temporarily refracted into a free-standing prism’ for the occasion. This is the scene I was attempting to evoke with the piece: the bustling atmosphere of the opening ceremony, with interjections by its attendees, hailing from various corners of the galaxy. I tried to make the music shape-shift like its namesake, and culminate in the triumphant unveiling of the ‘Heart of Gold’, a ship that becomes an important centre for the novels and, indeed, an important character in them. The Hooloovoo stands by, a splendid vision of blue, as the starship prepares to embark upon what will become, unbeknownst to the reader at this point, one hell of a voyage. All hail Douglas Adams, the architect of this universe and, as is said of one of the HHGTTG main characters Ford Prefect, ‘a frood who really knew where his towel was’.

 

More info on the release of the album when I know more…I’m looking forward to hearing the recording!

Edit: I just read that yesterday (11th March 2013) would have been DA’s 61st birthday, which makes this an accidentally timely post.

Quadraceratops and The Button Band at the Hackney Cut

On February 8th I ventured into the world of gig promoting and put on a double bill at the Hackney Cut. Quadraceratops were joined by The Button Band for a really nice evening of music, pizza, cake eating and general hanging out at a venue that boasts the address ‘Fish Island’. Sadly not open for public gigs any more (nothing to do with us!) the Hackney Cut is a great space and was also home to Dee Byrne’s ‘Jazz at the Hackney Cut’ weekly night.

We recorded and filmed the gig, and I’ll post some videos on here soon subject to the usual video-editing delay. Audio and I have a much better relationship though, so there are some recordings up on my Soundcloud page:

A big thanks to all the musicians, and also to Gideon Conn for producing the button/dinosaur flyer artwork that got so many compliments as I pushed it into people’s faces to promote the gig. The process of putting on a gig was moderately stressful but is definitely something I’d like to do more of. Plans are being hatched as you read this…