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[Ahmed] – the quartet of Pat Thomas, Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip and Seymour Wright – make music of heavy rhythm, repetition and syncopation set deep into an understanding of jazz and the obscure depths of its history. The group work and rework the music of the late musician Ahmed Abdul-Malik to create a stamping, swinging, relentlessly propulsive music where profundity and physicality root right back to ecstatic feeling.
Pat Thomas — Piano
Seymour Wright — Alto Saxophone
Joel Grip — Double Bass
Antonin Gerbal — Drums
Space är en pianotrio från Stockholm som skapar frijazz med full närvaro i varje ton. Med inspiration från amerikansk frijazz och samtida konstmusik bygger de dynamiska ljudlandskap där rå kraft möter finstämd lyhördhet. Allt sker i ögonblicket – från försiktiga klangmöten till explosiva urladdningar. På nya albumet Embrace the Space (Relative Pitch, 2024), inspelat på Fylkingen, bekräftar trion sin position som en av Nordens mest spännande improvisationsakter.
Med varje rörelse, varje ton, öppnar de nya möjligheter för lyssnaren. Här är inget förutsägbart – men allt är djupt närvarande.
Lisa Ullén – piano
Elsa Bergman – bass
Anna Lund – drums
Pat Thomas is a composer and pianist, widely recognised as a leading figure in contemporary improvised music.
He is renowned for his distinctive, percussive style of playing, and for weaving a wide range of influences like reggae, jungle, and Sufi philosophy into compositions and performances.
Of the course of his career he has collaborated with a wide range of jazz and improv luminaries, from Mike Cooper, Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, and Evan Parker, to more recent avant-figureheads like Moor Mother and Matana Roberts.
As well as an ongoing solo practice, current group projects include أحمد [ahmed] (with Seymour Wright, Antonin Gerbal, and Joel Grip), Black Top (with Orphy Robinson), and duos with Mariam Rezaei, Mark Fell, and Tyshawn Sorey.
Seymour Wright is a saxophonist. His work is about the creative, situated friction of learning, ideas, people and the saxophone – music, history and technique – actual and potential.
Seymour's solo music is documented on four widely-acclaimed collections - Seymour Wright of Derby (2008), Seymour Writes Back (2015) , Is This Right? (2017) and RITES (2023).
Current projects include: @xcrswx with Crystabel Riley; abaria with Ute Kanngiesser; [Ahmed] with Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip and Pat Thomas; GUO with Daniel Blumberg; XT with Paul Abbott; The Creaking Breeze Ensemble; a trans-atlantic duet with Andy Guthrie, and, with Jean-luc Guionnet a project addressing an imaginary lacunae in Aby Warburg's Atlas Mnemosyne.
@xcrswx
Antonin Gerbal is a percussion player, improviser and composer, active in the field of contemporary musics – from jazz to non-idiomatic languages.
He has studied music at Paris Conservatory and philosophy at EHESS. In 2009 he co-founded Umlaut France, an organization which runs the eponymous label and organizes concerts and festivals in Paris and Berlin. Antonin Gerbal is mainly using percussion elements to develop multiple accesses to musical languages in jazz, improvised or written music. He has collaborated with many international artists and played in United States, Japan, Russia and Europe.
Improvising bassist, Joel Grip, makes music at the countenance of the other.
Anchored to a spontaneously fermented musical approach, his music reverberates and transforms within a collective body of timing and sound.
Joel Grip practice improvising, as a way to learn and develop a forthright sound, and embrace its reactiveness, rapidity, and startling character with the aim of pushing music to intense, ecstatic and transformative levels.
Lisa Ullén lives in Stockholm, but grew up in the northern part of Sweden. She is a graduate of Stockholm’s Royal College of Music where she studied classical piano in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
A versatile player with a singular musical vision, Ullén has repeatedly proven her ability to imprint her absolute sense for tonal texture on whatever musical context she appears in from duos and small group collaborations with Nina de Heney and Okkyung Lee to larger ensemble situations such as Anna Högberg Attack!, Vilhelm Bromander Initiative and her own Motståndsorkestern (Resistance Orchestra).
Elsa Bergman studied double bass in Trondheim, Norway, at Sund Folkehøgskole and later at the Jazz Department of the Norwegian Academy of Music. Since then she has worked in various free jazz and improvisation groups.
She released her debut solo album 'A' in 2021.
Anna Lund is one of Sweden's most in-demand drummers, working across free jazz and improvisation and wide-ranging pop constellations including Ane Brun and Frida Hyvönen and has made music for Sweden's preminent theatres including Stadsteatern and Dramaten.

