Han-earl Park will be based in Los Angeles, California from June to December 2011, and is seeking formal or ad-hoc playing opportunities. Interested musicians, promoters, venues, please get in touch!
December 2011
New York
Han-earl Park will be based in New York from December 2011, and is seeking formal or ad-hoc playing opportunities. Interested musicians, promoters, venues, please get in touch!
late-2011/early-2012
Europe
Mathilde 253 (Charles Hayward: drums, percussion and melodica; Han-earl Park: guitar; and Ian Smith: trumpet and flugelhorn) is seeking performance opportunities in Europe in late-2011 or early-2012.
In addition, Han-earl Park (guitar) is available for formal or ad-hoc performances.
Interested promoters, venues and sponsors, please get in touch!
Thanks to Catherine Kirby and everyone at the National Concert Hall for able and professional assistance, to John Godfrey, Juniper Hill and Melanie L. Marshall, the then coordinators of the UCC Music Research Seminar Series, who strongly supported Wadada’s visit, and to Mary Hickson, Chris Gaughan, Peter Crudge, Eoin Winning and everyone at the Cork Opera House. Kudos to Tony O’Connor and Athos Tsiopani for the behind-the-scenes help, and to John Hough for the videography and the technical support. Thanks also to Carmel Daly and Mel Mercier of UCC School of Music; Gary Sheehan of Note Productions; Jeffrey Weeter, Paul O’Donnell and, formerly, Jesse Ronneau of the UCC Concerts Committee; and Andreas W. Ziemons, Niamh Ryan and Louise Walsh at Music Network. Thanks to David Leikam of the Arts Noticed, Linda Plover of Blue Monkey PR, Eoin Brady and Bernard Clarke of Nova, and Sandra Quinn at the Evening Echo for their support.
A big thank to the best sound engineer in the world, Alex Fiennes, for amplifying the Cork event, and making the performance sound its best! and to Melanie for the conversations and unofficial roadie duties. Kudos to Marian Murray for jumping into the deep end, a special note of thanks Paul G. Smyth for stepping-up to support this project, and to Dennis Cassidy, Fergus Cullen and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly who came to the rescue when our drum-hire situation briefly went into tail-spin.
And of course a big, big, big thanks to Charles Hayward, Ian Smith and Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith for letting me share in their skill, craft, intelligence, musicality, generosity and sense of play (and their patience with this first-time tour manager): I’ll treasure Charles’ rhythmic travels to the outer reaches of an alternative-universe Caribbean; Ian’s brave counterpoint; and the spiraling, expert stacatto precision of Wadada’s trumpet.
Last but not least, thanks to all who came to listen and witness creative music in real-time!
The real strength of the work is when the individual voices begin to shine, as they do on ‘Aachen’ for example—some savourable moments of interlining lines from Coxhill’s liquid fruit-juice sax and Smith’s horn. Park manages some imaginatively dissonant barbedly-wire phrases and false-harmonic scatterings from his detuned axe on ‘Similkameen,’ placing him very much in the Bailey mould, but that’s not a bad thing. Hayward puts in tons of hard work on his drum kit to keep up with the changing dynamics, and executes almost every paradiddle in the drummer’s manual on the long track ‘Kalimantan’ in his efforts to derail the collective train and steer the ship’s company over stony ground. Aye, the ingenuity and invention of these combined performances is impressive…. [Read the rest…]
This new improvising group… draws disparate personalities into one eccentric orbit. Han-Earl Park, a guitarist of Korean descent, residing in Ireland, is as at home in underground Noise as he is dueting with free jazz heroes like Paul Dunmall. Trumpeter Ian Smith is a stalwart of the London improv scene and drummer Charles Hayward is best known for his work with seminal post-Punk experimenters This Heat. On these live recordings they generate a surprising amount of heat. Park uses pedals to smudge and smear chords or rolls out strange robotic grumblings, a technician playing electricity as much as the guitar. Smith has a high, taut attach, like a more tuneful version of Donald Ayler’s pure energy. And Hayward… makes a good fist of playing freely…. Veteran saxophonist Coxhill rounds it out to a quartet for two tunes, making this a very satisfying debut.
Thanks to all those hosting and organizing the performances: Mike Hurley and the rest of the Fizzle gang, Sibyl Madrigal of Boat-ting, Matthew Collings (who also sourced the tools for a mid-tour kluge repair of my amplifier), and the Lewisham Arthouse. Kudos to Reka Sanders, Joe Hope and Han-ter Park for putting a roof over this itinerant musician.
Big thanks to Paul Dunmall and Mark Sanders for the high-energy, musical workout, to Owen Green for introducing me to the musical (and comical) applications of a cardboard box, to Pat Thomas for his skill and wit, to Lol Coxhill for being the inimitable Lol Coxhill, and to the rest of Mathilde 253—to Charles Hayward and Ian Smith—for pushing and pulling into ever more fascinating musical spaces.
Last but not least, thanks to all who came to listen/watch.
…A bustling, talkative seventy-four minutes made up of angular, Baileyesque electric guitar, some fantastic drum splashes mixed with occasional bursts of less traditional percussive sounds such as the small metallic chimes heard in the opening seconds of the album, and the chattery, conversational style of the trumpet and horn. …The playing here is very fine, a tightly woven mass of sounds with no one real dominating voice but each musician expressive and energetic. The music is all about the conversation, but a real heart-on-the-sleeve collision course of a conversation, but nevertheless the result of the musicians listening to one another and responding. The addition of Coxhill’s softer soprano on the last two pieces do slow the music a little, but the jazz credentials remain. If the music’s progression is a little less choppy then melody and hints at standardised rhythm creep in, but the improvised discussion carries on, perhaps the words are less heated but the debate remains of interest. [Read the rest…]
My favorite tracks are the last two, in which the group is joined by saxophone legend Lol Coxhill. The four minute guitar/sax duet at the beginning of Track 6 is inspired; the two really seem to be conversing with one another. [Read the rest…]
