[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 studied classical piano from aged 8 and started playing Jazz from the age of 16. He has since gone on to develop an utterly unique style - embracing improvisation, jazz and new music.

Islamic innovation is at the heart of Thomas’ solo projects and draws a direct link between his Sufi faith and a totally unique style of playing. Each of his solo piano records is a dedication - not just to the innovators Thomas names but to the beauty of the universe in all its complexities.

“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.

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.

www.umlautrecords.com/people/antonin-gerbal

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.

joelgrip.com

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).

lisaullen.com

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.