SOLD OUT.
Globe Unity Orchestra perform on the occasion of their 50 year anniversary alongside the second ever outing for the duo of Peter Brötzmann & Heather Leigh and a quartet of London free improv renegades: cellist Ute Kanngiesser, alto saxophonist Seymour Wright, Billy Steiger on violin and Paul Abbott on drums.
Globe Unity Orchestra's appearance was made possible with support from the Goethe Institut, Sweden.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the big band Alexander von Schlippenbach originally convened for the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1966. Since then Globe Unity has gone on to be one of "the most remarkable assemblies of outside jazz talent since the AACM big bands" (John Litweiller, The Freedom Principle).
Henrik Waldforff saxophones
Gerd Dudek saxophones
Frederik Ljungkvist saxophones
Axel Dörner trumpet
Manfred Schoof
Peter Brötzmann is one of the most important and uncompromising figures in free jazz and has been at the forefront of developing a unique, European take on free improvisation since the 1960s.
Brötzmann first trained as a painter and was associated with Fluxus (Participating in various events and working as an assistant to Nam Jun Paik) before dissatisfaction with the art world moved his focus towards music. However he continued to paint and his instantly recognisable visual sensibility has produced some of our favourite LP sleeves as well as a number of gallery shows in recent years.
Self-taught on Clarinet and Saxophone, Brötzmann established himself as one of the most powerful and original players around, releasing a number of now highly sought after sides of musical invention including the epochal 'Machine Gun' session in 1968 - originally released on his own Brö private press and later recordings for FMP (Free Music Production) the label he started with Jost Gebers. Brötzmann's sound is "one of the most distinctive, life-affirming and joyous in all music" and he has performed with almost all of the major players of free music from early associations with Don Cherry and Steve Lacy to regular groupings with Peter Kowald, Alex Von Slippenbach, Han Bennink and Fred Van Hove, the Chicago Tentet (Mats Gustafsson/Joe McPhee/Ken Vandermark and more) and various one-off and ad hoc associations with many others including Keiji Haino, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton and Rashied Ali.
The daughter of a coal miner, weaving a trail from West Virginia to Texas and now residing in Scotland, Heather Leigh furthers the vast unexplored reaches of pedal steel guitar. She’s performed and released music since the 1990s as a solo artist and with a wide range of uncompromising collaborators from Peter Brötzmann to Jandek and has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Her playing is as physical as it is phantom, combining spontaneous compositions with a feel for the full interaction of flesh with hallucinatory power sources. With a rare combination of sensitivity and strength, Leigh’s steel mainlines sanctified slide guitar and deforms it using hypnotic tone-implosions, juggling walls of bleeding amp tone with choral vocal constructs and wrenching single note ascensions.
She’s played/performed/released music with Ash Castles On The Ghost Coast, Charalambides, Scorces (a duo with Christina Carter), the Dream/Aktion Unit (a group with Thurston Moore, Paul Flaherty, Chris Corsano and Matt Heyner), Taurpis Tula, Jailbreak (a duo with Chris Corsano) and Jandek, as well as collaborated with Peter Brötzmann, Lynda (as Termas), Stefan Jaworyzn (as Annihilating Light), Richard Youngs, Blood Stereo, MV & EE, Robbie Yeats of The Dead C, John Olson of Wolf Eyes, Smegma, Jutta Koether, Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Baer and many others.
“Pedal steel guitar player from hell. Not for the faint-hearted.” The List Magazine
“All notions of the pedal steel’s laid-back, country harmony are shattered as Leigh extols jagged notes and blocks of electric noise that seem to rail against rock, jazz and other notions of freedom music.” Dusted Magazine
“She is summoning the spirits of the ghost-women of rock ’n’ roll past who were perceived as the sponges of the love-cloaked-violence and guitar-death-gazes of the almighty rocker” Tiny Mix Tapes
“A very radical saxophonist” – Evan Parker
Seymour Wright of Derby, his first solo album is widely considered to be a defining document of 21st-century, ‘inter-textual’ saxophone and now with his saxophone (mostly) no longer in pieces he has played in several often surprising and increasingly peculiar settings – from the on-going extreme twistings of lll人 (joined on one occasion by Otomo Yoshihide) and lll人lll (with Yuki Yamamoto, Howard Slater and Ute Kanngiesser), the lava flow of xomlatesc tbobnhi’s four-day London Jazz Festival residency and the robop-debut of CYNTHIA, to duets with Ute Kanngiesser (a rare public, many-year hebdomadal), Daniel Blumberg (Hebronix) and saxophonist John Butcher.
Increasingly he has been performing and recording music in more jazz-like settings too, exploring aspects of the early NYAQ and a certain jazz tradition in Steve Noble’s current group and performing the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik in أحمد a newly convened quartet with Pat Thomas, Joel Grip and Antonin Gerbal. This on-going trajectory, through the weird, is making the range of his music making and collaborative creativity increasingly public.
Billy Steiger was born in Howth on the 16th December, 1986. Now he plays the violin.
“Then he sat down by a pond and began to play a tune. As he played, the most extraordinary thing happened. One by one the fish in the pond began to jump out and fly about in the air. And what is more, they were all different colours and they were singing to the music.” — Patrick, Quentin Blake.
Ute Kanngiesser is a German, London based cellist:
“For over 10 years, I have only played unscripted/improvised music. I have experimented with the sound of the cello, limiting myself to the alive material at hand: vast and complicated layers within the instrument and myself; and to let this music evolve continuously in relationship with others. It relates to the process of uncovering an endless multiplicity of coexisting sense perspectives. And it deals with the energy that this gives rise to. For me, it is the most exciting place to play music from.”
Most recent collaborations have been with Seymour Wright, Dimitra Lazaridou Chatzigoga, Rie Nakajima, Jennifer Allum, John Butcher, Terry Day, Billy Steiger, Tom Wheatley, Paul Abbott, Guillaume Viltard, and Daniel Blumberg.