Marian Murray, Alexander Hawkins, Paul Dowling and Tony O’Connor (photo: © 2010 Julia Healy)

Big, big thanks to guest artist Alexander Hawkins for taking time out of his busy schedule to join the Lab; for his generosity and his musicality. I can’t think of a better improviser with whom to close the season.

Thanks also to the double basses of The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) Of… (Paul Dowling and Tony O’Connor), and to all who performed (Andrea Bonino, Juniper Hill, Marian Murray, Han-earl Park and Kevin Terry). We gratefully acknowledges the support of the UCC School of Music and the Basement Project Space in making the June 2010 event possible. Thank again to Veronica Tadman for work behind the scenes, and to photographer Julia Healy [see the photographs (new window)…].

And as always, thanks to all who came to listen, and to all who supported the Lab during the 2009–2010 season. See you in October!

As with all the recordings since December 2008, this month’s recordings are covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. [More info…]

And as if that’s not enough, we’ve got one of the most unusual manifestations of The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) Of… with Paul Dowling (bass guitar) and Tony O’Connor (bass guitar).

Come along, witness the compelling real-time collisions, and help make the 2009-2010 season go out with a bang, fizz, clang, buzz, bloop and bleep!

…And, in the meantime, here’s a clip of Alex Hawkins with Tony Marsh:

Stet Lab gratefully acknowledges the support of the UCC School of Music and the Basement Project Space for this month’s event.

Stet Lab featuring virtuoso pianist-improviser Alexander Hawkins

Tuesday, 15 June 2010

7:15 pm (doors: 7:00 pm)

Ó Riada Hall [map…]
UCC Music Building
Sundays Well
Cork, Ireland

€10 (€5)

Featuring the leading English pianist and improviser Alexander Hawkins, the final Stet Lab event of the 2009-2010 season will take place at 7:15 pm on Tuesday 15 June 2010 at the Ó Riada Hall, UCC Music Building, Sundays Well, Cork, Ireland.

Recently heard performing with the legendary Sonny Simmons, and with the pioneering Joe McPhee, Alexander Hawkins has been dubbed “one of the brightest rising young stars of British jazz and improvisation” by John Eyles (All About Jazz). This appearance at Stet Lab marks his Irish debut.

Hawkins is a powerful and inventive performer best know as a member of the transatlantic Convergence Quartet (with Dominic Lash, Taylor Ho Bynum and Harris Eisenstadt), and his own 6-piece Ensemble (featuring Orphy Robinson, Otto Fischer, Hannah Marshall, Lash and Javier Carmona). In the British improvised music scene Hawkins is the most sought after pianist of his generation, as sideman he has worked in Evan Parker’s trio and quartet, and he has performed with jazz and improvised music luminaries including Louis Moholo-Moholo, Lol Coxhill, John Butcher, Mark Sanders, Steve Williamson, Tom Arthurs, John Russell, Pat Thomas and Eddie Prévost.

Also performing at the event will be Stet Lab regulars including Kevin Terry, Susan Geaney, Marian Murray and Han-earl Park.

Opening the event will be Stet Lab’s resident ensemble The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) of… led by Cork-based improviser and bass player Tony O’Connor.

The event will begin at 7:15 pm (doors open at 7:00 pm) and entry is €10 (€5).

Stet Lab gratefully acknowledges the support of the UCC School of Music and the Basement Project Space for this month’s event.

the performers

Born in Oxford in 1981, Alexander Hawkins is a pianist described as having a “wizards’ touch” and a “fierce technique.” Indeed, a recent interview commented that he is “just emerging as one of the most striking voices of his generation, both with unique things to say and unique ways of expressing them” (David Grundy, Eartrip).

He leads his own 6-piece Ensemble, featuring Orphy Robinson, Otto Fischer, Hannah Marshall, Dominic Lash, and Javier Carmona. One review of this group’s debut record, No Now Is So (FMR Records), wrote that “barbed dissonance and wrenching romanticism [are the] clear poles by which he operates…such absolute joy and strength…an incredible record” (Clifford Allen, Bagatellen).

He co-leads the transatlantic Convergence Quartet, featuring Dominic Lash, Hawkins, American Taylor Ho Bynum and Canadian Harris Eisenstadt; a band which has toured the United Kingdom twice (2006 and 2009). Their first album placed in two critics’ Top Ten Releases of 2007 lists. Stuart Broomer in Point of Departure wrote of “a fundamental reassertion of composition within improvised music,” and Jay Collins (Cadence) of “highly unpredictable and thought-provoking music to savor with endless room for future consideration.”

Hawkins also plays in the cooperative group Barkingside, whose eponymous debut album (Emanem) placed in the Top Ten lists in 2008. According to John Eyles in All About Jazz “the level of group empathy displayed here is scary.”

As a sideman, he has worked in Evan Parker’s trio and quartet. He also features in Ntshuks Bonga’s Qwati, alongside Claude Deppa, Gail Brand, Greg Bonnie, Oren Marshall, and Mark Sanders.
Other collaborations have included with Louis Moholo-Moholo, Lol Coxhill, John Butcher, Steve Williamson, Jason Yarde, Ray Warleigh, Alan Wilkinson, Tom Arthurs, Tony Marsh, Will Gaines, John Russell, Steve Waterman, Pete McPhail, Pat Thomas, Eddie Prevost, Francine Luce, and many others. He has worked in the London Improvisers’ Orchestra, the Oxford Improvisers Orchestra, and the Pendulum Big Band; and also plays organ in the funk band Big Train’s Haymaker.

He has played at venues including Symphony Hall, Birmingham; London’s Ronnie Scott’s, Vortex Jazz Club, 606, Koko, Spitz, 93 Feet East, Scala, and Cargo; West Road, Cambridge; the Jacqueline Du Pre Music Building, Oxford; St Sulpice, Paris; the Clothworkers’ Centenary Hall, Leeds; and many others. He has been broadcast in various places, including on BBC Radio 3 and BBC 6 Music. Festival appearances have included the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Cheltenham Jazz Festival, and Freedom of the City.

Forthcoming projects include a collaboration with North Americans Rob Brown, Mark Helias and Harris Eisenstadt; the recording of Ntshuks Bonga’s Qwati; the Somedectet large group; and an organ trio with Steve Noble and John Edwards (recording due for release later in the year on Bo’weavil Recordings).

Hawkins seems to get better every time I see him live; every solo he took tonight was a journey, or, if you prefer, a well-told short story. They would begin as jazz explorations, or even boogie-woogie-flavoured romps, before whipping themselves up to a frenzy of clanging clusters, rolling glissandi, and fast-paced, dissonant runs, like a dancer tripping over their feet as the speed of their performance spins out of control. This was both tremendously exciting and the consequence of a logical development—jazz taken to the edge and then pushed over, because there really was no where else to go—and it was always—somehow—contained within the framework of a two or three minute showcase.

(David Grundy, Streams of Expression)

Improviser, guitarist and constructor Han-earl Park works from/within/around traditions of fuzzily idiomatic, on occasion experimental, mostly open improvised musics, sometimes engineering theater, sometimes inventing ritual. He feels the gravitational pull of collaborative, multi-authored contexts, and has worked with animators, film makers, poets, theater and mime performers, dancers and installation artists. He has performed in clubs, theaters, art galleries, concert halls, and (ad-hoc) alternative spaces in Denmark, England, Ireland, The Netherlands, Scotland and the USA.

He is involved in ongoing collaborations with Bruce Coates, and with Franziska Schroeder, fifteen year long associations with Alex Fiennes and Murray Campbell. Recent performances include ensemble Mathilde 253 (Park, Charles Hayward and Ian Smith) with Lol Coxhill, a concert with Paul Dunmall, with Kato Hideki and Katie O’Looney, and the performance of Pauline Oliveros’ ‘Droniphonia’ alongside the composer. He has appeared at festivals including Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology Festival (California), dialogues festival (Edinburgh), Sonorities (Belfast) and VAIN Live Art (Oxford).

Park founded and curates Stet Lab, a monthly improvised music space in Cork, Ireland, and teaches improvisation at the UCC School of Music.

Big thanks to Juniper Hill who, with shape note singers Sam Backer, Claire Hogan, Sadhbh O’Flynn, Barry Twomey and Robert Wedgbury, contributed of the most adventurous of Labs. Thanks also to The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) Of… Marian Murray, Claudia Schwab and Kevin Terry for revisiting (and reinventing) the Stet Lab double fiddle and guitar format. Kudos to all who performed, regulars (Andrea Bonino, Tony O’Connor and Han-earl Park) and newcomer (Gavin Prior), and to Veronica Tadman for work behind the scenes.

Thanks for listening!

note: Because of the poor audio quality of the recordings (there’s significant distortion on the recordings of the vocal ensemble), I am not releasing the full recording of the May 2010 performances. If I am able to ameliorate the recordings, the complete recording of the May 2010 performances may be available at a later date. In the meantime, if any of the performers involved would like copies of the recording, please get in touch.

As with all the recordings since December 2008, this month’s recordings are covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. [More info…]

I grabbed my very old, slightly damp-damaged guitar strap off the wall and headed out the door.

It may be as much as fifteen years since I performed standing up with the guitar (and the last time may have been for a game piece by Pedro Rebelo that required a degree of physical and theatrical mobility).

I expected the experience to be physically and psychologically… odd, but I wasn’t prepared for the oddness of keeping my boots on.

And, hey, I never realized how (socio-musically) useful it is to be able to move fro and back as you signal the move from foreground to background.

I figured if I couldn’t carry the 15–20 minutes I’d be playing in the relatively safe space of the Lab without the usual resources (of variable volume envelopes, of the familiar posture), I’d be in trouble playing with the old-timers at OTO. I needed to know….

So I’m up there with John Godfrey: I’ve heard him play over the years, of course, but this was our first on-stage meetings, and I wanted this to be different—to provoke a different kind of music.

And without my usual resources, the volume pedal in particular, I’d figured it would be relatively easy to contrast with John’s highly technically mediated sound (‘sound,’ again, in the afrological sense).

I wanted the performers (myself and John) to work. In a similar maneuver to the encounter with Evan Dorrian, I wanted to create a context in which we’d have to exert effort, to labor; to push him, and, hopefully, to be pushed and pulled in return.

From a curatorial standpoint, however, a problem with this approach is that, as the Lab progresses though the evening, and as many more people engage on-stage (which is a good thing), there’s often gradual downward slope in terms of densities, complexities and energy levels. The format in which the relatively experienced improvisers do their shtick early on during the evening was a created in response to comments from audience members that they desired to witness “how it should (or could) be done” before the relative rookies took to the stage.

But that energy dip….

As curator and club-runner, how might I solve this problem without wrecking the Stet Lab mission? Is it a problem?

Talking to Owen Sutton (drummer) and Tony O’Connor (bass player) after the five (count ’em) guitar ensemble that closed the Lab, I remarked that one of the complications (and one that I worried about prior to the guitar quintet’s performance ten minutes to venue close) stemmed from guitarists generally have bad braking times.

We’re not like our true rhythm section brethren (drummers, bass players, etc.) or our frontline counterparts (horn players, fiddler, vocalists). A braking latency is a trait we share with other idiomatically polyphonic instrumentalists (keyboard players, pianists). Many of us came from the bedroom and can too easily get lost in our little worlds; solipsistic and oblivious to anything but the neat stuff flowing from under our fingers. [Seriously, listen to the track and count how many times you think this happens.]

During the quintet Kevin Terry deploys a moment of near-verbatim quotation. It’s funny and it’s effective.

Sometime later (for me significantly later in the context of this ditty), Enda Buckley also throws one in.

I’m reminded of one student who would, with impeccable timing, while the rest of the ensemble were doing the Make-A-New-Music-Noise-Here routine, would throw in a beautiful open DΔ chord on his guitar at exactly the wrong (thus entirely right) time. It would send the self-fashioned New Music Ensemble reeling from the comfort of its plink-plonks, bloop-bleeps and scratch-crashes.

Fantastic!

This is what Cage never understood. For the Cagian doctrine, all sounds can be sounds as long as it had (ostensibly, and according to culturally and ideologically (and racially) specific criteria) was ‘free’ of history and context. What Cage (and his followers) were barricading themselves from was not convention, but power—the power to disrupt their cozy, easy liberalism.

But that’s a story for some other time….

The pleasure / utility / power of a quote is to throw a big fat spanner into the working of group improvisation.

The drawback / hazard / weakness of a quote can be summed up by the question: now what?

A single quote (as opposed to an explicitly and contiguously idiomatic performance, or a scatter-brained collage of channel-hopping) can have interesting and problematic consequences for interaction. The effectiveness of the quote—to be able to collapse and redirect and improvisation—is also what makes them hard to deal with. Now what? Given that this quote redefined and reconstructed the performance up to this point, now what? I wonder what consequences Kevin and, in particular, Enda were expecting?

John Godfrey and Han-earl Park (photo: © 2010 Julia Healy)

A very warm thanks to guest artist John Godfrey for some high-energy improvisations. Thanks also to everyone else who played: regulars (Tony O’Connor, Han-earl Park, Owen Sutton, Veronica Tadman and Kevin Terry), returning familiar faces (Andrea Bonino), and newcomers (Enda Buckley, Ilse De Ziah, Bertrand Galen and Athoulis Tsiopani). Major kudos to photographer Julia Healy [see the photographs (new window)…], and to all who helped in the backstage running of the Lab.

Finally a big thanks to all who came to listen!

As with all the recordings since December 2008, this month’s recordings are covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. [More info…]

Also performing will be The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) Of… Enda Buckley (guitar), Tony O’Connor (bass guitar), Owen Sutton (drums) and Athoulis Tsiopani (keyboards).

Featuring improvising musicians from a diverse field of practices and traditions, this one promises to be one of a kind. We hope to see y’all there, and thank you for your continued support.

Stet Lab featuring composer-improviser John Godfrey

Monday, 12 April 2010

9:00 pm (doors: 8:45 pm)

Upstairs @ The Roundy [map…]
Castle Street
Cork, Ireland

€10 (€5)

Stet Lab returns on Monday, 12 April 2010 to the Roundy, Castle Street, Cork and features John Godfrey a veteran of Experimental and New Music in Ireland.

A virtuoso performer on both piano/keyboards and on electric guitar, John Godfrey’s performances encompass composed, improvised and part-composed/part-improvised work.

Regularly seen in Cork and throughout Ireland performing with various ensembles, as a performer Godfrey has also toured extensively through, America, Europe and Australia with Ireland’s premier New Music group, The Crash Ensemble. He is director of The Quiet Music Ensemble, curator of the Quiet Music Festival (Cork), and cofounder and former director of Icebreaker (UK), one of the most successful New Music ensembles.

In addition to these ensembles, Godfrey’s compositions have been performed by ensembles such as the world renowned Bang on a Can All Stars (USA) and Bradyworks (Canada).

Opening the event will be The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) Of… Enda Buckley (guitar), Tony O’Connor (bass guitar), Owen Sutton (drums) and Athoulis Tsiopani (keyboards). Fusing and fragmenting idioms and traditions, the quartet will leap from country to hardcore in a single bound.

The event will begin at 9:00 pm (doors open at 8:45 pm) and entry is €10 (€5).

The following month’s Stet Lab will take place on Monday, 10 May 2010, featuring the vocalist, improviser and ethnomusicologist Juniper Hill, plus violinists Marian Murray and Claudia Schwab, and guitarists Kevin Terry and Philip Guiton.

the performers

John Godfrey is a composer and performer and lectures in the Music School of the University College Cork. He has a long history of involvement with new music, as composer, performer, teacher and entrepreneur.

Godfrey’s compositions and arrangements have been performed worldwide and many appear on CD. He has written for many prestigious ensembles, including The Bang On A Can All-Stars (USA), Bradyworks (Canada), The Crash Ensemble (Ireland) and Icebreaker (UK). He has written music for The CruX Dance Company, based in Cork. He recently completed a commission for The Crash Ensemble.

Previously highly influenced by the Hague School, Godfrey’s compositional work is currently focussed on experimental and improvisation-based music, often with live and interactive electronics. It is particularly influenced by experimental music based on acoustical phenomena, such as that by La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier.

In 2006, he was awarded an Equipment Bursary by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon for purchase of equipment for research into live improvising/interactive computer systems. Another Arts Council award in 2007 allowed Godfrey to establish a new professional performing ensemble and to run a major festival of Experimental Music in Cork (summer, 2008). The Festival included the first Deep Listening Retreat with Pauline Oliveros in Ireland, and featured new works, and appearances by, Alvin Lucier, Mark Appelbaum, David Toop and others.

Godfrey performs pre-composed, improvised and semi-improvised work, both on piano/keyboards and on electric guitar.

In 1989 he cofounded, and was subsequently the Musical Director of, the new music group Icebreaker, which became one of the most successful ensembles in its field. The group appeared extensively in Europe and America, and made several CDs for Decca Argo (UK), New Tone (Italy), Donemus (Holland) and Canteloupe (USA). He left Icebreaker in 1997, and in the same year was invited to join Ireland’s premiere new music group, the Crash Ensemble. The latter has also toured extensively, with major appearances in Europe, the US, and Australia, and has made a number of recordings and radio broadcasts

Godfrey has set up many new initiatives in the field of new music in Cork, including two festivals of contemporary music in 1997 and 1998, and has been an outspoken promoter of new music in the city. He works with many local artists and performs with Cork’s improvisation collective The Quiet Club.

The event will feature composer-improviser John Godfrey (guitar) plus the The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) of… Enda Buckley (guitar), Tony O’Connor (bass guitar), Owen Sutton (drums) and Athoulis Tsiopani (keyboard).

To be informed of future events, please join the Stet Lab – announce, or subscribe to the web feed (news only or all blog posts). [More info…]

Nick Williams and Paul Stapleton (photo: © 2010 Julia Healy)

Thanks to Paul Stapleton and Nick Williams for an exciting and eclectic set, to everyone else that played (Juniper Hill, Ruti Lachs, Tony O’Connor, Han-earl Park, Veronica Tadman and Kevin Terry), and to photographer Julia Healy [see the photographs (new window)…].

Last but not least, special thanks to all who came to listen and witness musical mutations in motion!

As with all the recordings since December 2008, this month’s recordings are covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. [More info…]