Monday 9 May 2016, 8pm
A one-time collaboration between Jon Rose and Nimmersatt.
NIMMERSATT takes a quasi-compositional approach to de-centered, parallel chaos (following a proposal by Belgian pianist/organist Daan Vandewalle) with former Henry Cow rhythm section Chris Cutler (UK) and John Greaves (France). This will be their first appearance in the UK.
JON ROSE (Australia) has done everything with everybody, more or less everywhere.
Australian based violinist, improviser, composer, inventor, multi-media artist, and writer Jon Rose has been at the sharp end of experimental music and sound art for 40 years. His primary life's work is The Relative Violin: the innovation of a total artform based around the violin in all its manifestations.
He has appeared on more than 100 albums, radiophonic and media works and in collaborations with the Kronos Quartet, John Zorn, Alvin Curran, Otomo Yoshihide, Christian Marclay, Ilan Volkov and most other names you can think of in the world’s New Music, Jazz, and Sound Art festivals.
Internationally acclaimed performer of 20th and 21st century piano music from Charles Ives and Olivier Messiaen to Ligeti, Carter and Ustvolskaya; from the Lincoln Centre and Carnegie Hall to the Salzburg Mozarteum. A life-long collaboration with American composer Alvin Curran resulted in a series of 6 hour marathon performances of the piano cycle Inner Cities. He has premiered works by Frederic Rzewski, Clarence Barlowe, Maria De Alvear, Gordon Mumma and is one of the only pianists in the world to play the entire Opus Clavicembalisticum by Sorabji.
John Greaves was given a bass guitar at the age of 12 by his father — Ray Irving, Welsh dance-band leader — and within six months he was playing in the band. At Cambridge University, in 1969, he joined Henry Cow, eventually leaving in 1976 to work on Kew.Rhone in New York with Peter Blegvad — after which he returned to the UK to work in theatre as a composer, arranger and actor. In early 1978 he joined National Health, remaining with them until they disbanded in 1980, when he began a series of solo projects, releasing several LPs and working at the same time with the Penguin Cafe Orchestra and the Michael Nyman Band. In 1984 he moved to France, permanently, forming a series of touring bands and releasing a series of new albums with — amongst others - David Cunningham (of the Flying Lizards), Robert Wyatt, Leslie Caron and Louis Sclavis, at the same time working with Mike Mantler, Jack Buce, Nick Mason and Don Preston. He and Karen Mantler performed together in 1997 in Mike Mantler’s opera School of Understanding in Denmark. In 2011 he fronted the Orchestre National de Jazz at the legendary Theatre du Chatelet, Paris, singing several Billie Holiday songs, and since the mid-2000’s his main compositional focus has been on the French poet Paul Verlaine, whose work he has set on a number of CDs and in other contexts.
10 years in Henry Cow; founded or co-founded Art Bears, News from Babel, Cassiber, The (ec) Nudes, p53, The Bad Boys and The Science Group; permanent member of The Peter Blegvad Trio, Pere Ubu, The Wooden Birds, Brainville III, Himmel, The Watts The European Improvising Ensemble and Les Quatre Gutaristes; dalliance with The Residents, Gong, Faust; worked with dance, film, hoerspiel, theatre, symphony orchestras and radio; toured the world with his extended electrified kit and in countless improvising contexts with the usual suspects; ran a year-long daily soundscape project for Resonance FM (2003/4); founded and runs the independent label ReR Megacorp; author of File Under Popular and Not as we Choose, various articles and papers; stint on faculty at the Museum School in Boston; lectures irregularly on music related topics and is currently producing a series of podcast talks for the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona (Probes).
