Martin Davidson, who died just before Christmas at the age of 81, was a valued friend of improvised music in Britain and elsewhere. Most significantly, he ran the Emanem label, which made its debut in 1974 with Steve Lacy’s first album of unaccompanied soprano saxophone pieces. Emanem went on to amass a catalogue of new and archive vinyl releases featuring the first generation of London-based improvisers — John Stevens, Trevor Watts, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Paul Rutherford and so on — and then, following its re-emergence as a CD label in the mid-’90s, of their successors and many others. T ..read more

Xhosa Cole and Caroline Kraabel arrive at Café Oto In the middle of the afternoon, an outsized multicoloured scarf walked through the door into the Vortex, playing an alto saxophone. It turned out, after he had unwrapped himself, to be Xhosa Cole, who carried on playing as he made his way to the stage. There he fitted seamlessly into a free improvisation being devised by the trumpeter Chris Batchelor, the tenorist Julian Siegel, the cellist Shirley Smart and the pianist Liam Noble as part of a three-venue benefit for the saxophonist Jason Yarde. Yarde, who is one of Britain’s very greatest jaz ..read more

It seemed fitting that the final performance of AMM, the pioneering London-based improvising ensemble, should have featured two of the musicians who started the group in 1965. Eddie Prévost, with a small array of gongs, cymbals and drums, and Keith Rowe, originally a guitarist but now manipulating small boxes to trigger and modify samples or electronic signals, appeared together at Café Oto in Dalston last night in the fourth and last event held in celebration of Prévost’s recent 80th birthday. AMM, whose name remains defiantly undecoded, started out with the saxophonist Lou Gare alongside Ro ..read more

Alexander Hawkins and Evan Parker (photo: Dawid Laskowski) Organising free improvisers might seem like a fool’s task. Why would the special breed of players who spend their lives resolutely creating music from scratch suddenly want to submit to the will of a composer? Nevertheless, history proves that sometimes it works: notable successes were recorded by Michael Mantler with the original Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, Alexander von Schlippenbach with his Globe Unity Orchestra and Barry Guy with the London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra. Each project depended to some extent on the leader/composer’s fam ..read more

In normal times, the vibraphonist, drummer and percussionist Martin Pyne is involved in collaborations with dancers. When the Covid-19 lockdown began, he compensated for the enforced halt in that activity by spending part of May and June in his home studio, recording music for imaginary choreography. The result is Spirit of Absent Dancers, an album of 19 short solo pieces ranging from Tibetan prayer bowls to a standard drum kit. In terms of percussion improvisation, try to imagine something that runs from the Zen sound-painting of Frank Perry to the light swing of Billy Higgins. There’s nothi ..read more

I’ve taken a lot of pleasure in recent days from listening to Underground London, a three-CD set that attempts to recreate, through a mosaic of recordings, the feeling of being a certain kind of person in London in the first half of the 1960s, someone either growing out of, or who had been a little too young for, the full beatnik experience in the 1950s, but looking for similar sensations in a changing time: free speech, free jazz, free verse, free love. The first disc starts with Ornette Coleman’s “W.R.U.”, ends with Jimmy Smith’s “Autumn Leaves”, and includes Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading ..read more

Toby Hay and David Ian Roberts are Welsh guitarists who occasionally play together. They’ve just released three tracks recorded in the Capel Y Graig, a deconsecrated chapel in Ceredigion now used as an art space, on Bandcamp. I think they’re marvellous. I know Toby Hay’s work from a fine 2018 album called The Longest Day, and from the series of morning and evening guitar pieces he recorded and filmed outdoors and put on YouTube in the first week of April (search @tobyhaymusic). He’s the right-handed player on the right of the photograph. His work reminds me a little bit of what the late Sandy ..read more

The news that this week’s Punkt festival in Birmingham has been postponed is no surprise. Live music of any sort in a public setting is going to be unavailable to most people for some time to come, but the loss of this two-day event will be keenly felt. As I discovered at its Norwegian home in Kristiansand last year, Punkt is a very special event, conceived by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré as a vehicle for the exploration of the possibilities of live remixing. Among those due to perform in Birmingham were the trumpeter/singer Arve Henriksen, the guitarist Eivind Aarset, the singer Maja S. K. Ratkj ..read more

The pianist Steve Beresford is celebrating his 70th birthday this weekend with three shows at Cafe Oto, mixing and matching friends and colleagues each night under the rubric PIANO TOYS MUSIC NOISE. The bill is a fine reflection of the generosity of spirit that has made Steve a key figure in the London scene for four and a half decades, whether as a collaborator with Derek Bailey, the Flying Lizards, John Zorn, Tristan Honsinger, Evan Parker, the Dedication Orchestra and countless others or in his role as a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster. Last night I particularly enjoyed a ..read more

After several books in which he perceptively explored the place and meaning of sound in our lives — including Oceans of Sound, Exotica, Haunted Weather, Sinister Resonance and Into the Maelstrom — now David Toop tells us how he came by his deep love and remarkable understanding of music. Flutter Echo: Living Within Sound, first published two years ago in Japan, where he has a devoted following, is now available in an English edition, and will provide valuable reading for anyone interested in the breadth of Toop’s interests. That certainly includes me. If Toop is interested in something, the c ..read more