The duo of Lol Coxhill on soprano saxophone and Roger Turner on drums & percussion, performing at Brest & London in 2003 and 2010; unusual conversation from two long-standing improvising colleagues.
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Lol Coxhill-soprano saxophone
Roger Turner-drum set and percussion
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UPC: 5030243501021
Label: Emanem
Catalog ID: 5010
Squidco Product Code: 13823
Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2010
Country: Great Britain
Packaging: Cardstock 3 page foldover
Tracks 1-3 were organized during the 5th edition of the Festival Luisances Sonores, recorded by Benjamin Maumus and Cedric Megaulk. Track 4 was recorded in concert on August 12th, 2010 by Martin Davidson.
"Excerpts from sleeve notes:
Elsie Artie (Lol and Roger) probably first met at the Bath Last Resort festival in England in the very early 1970's. They've played in a lot of different combinations since - in marching bands in Welwyn Garden City, in a short-lived incarnation of the Johnny Rondo Trio, in Lol's new orleans-flavoured "Before my Time" band, in lots of ad hoc combinations, and since 1982 most often in the Recedents with Mike Cooper around Britain, Europe and Canada.
The recordings here are from a tour they had as a duo in France, during which they played in the wonderful Espace Vauban theatre in Brest - an old building that has the hotel on the upper floors where the musicians stay, a restaurant on the ground floor where they can eat, and the theatre below where they work. A nice little spot indeed.
The Shoreditch recording reflects something of the church acoustics, and was the first of two sets played there. The building dates from 1740, and its bells are mentioned in the famous nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons", a startling fact that not a lot of people might know, as it happens."-Emanem
Excerpts from reviews:
"You can hear them tumbling deeper into the wonderland, generating sounds and structures so touchy-feely sculptural you could walk inside them if they weren't on a CD. The frustration is, of course, that Coxhill isn't driven to make more records. Whenever he plays, a whole narrative about the history of the soprano saxophone, from Sidney Bechet and Johnny Hodges to Steve Lacy, via Bruce Turner, sparks into life. But calculating those historical joins clearly isn't the point - during the 58 minutes it takes to play this disc Coxhill remains as poker-faced as a Sphinx.
Even when, four minutes into the second track, Turner lays down a crazy-fast swing groove, Coxhill leaves any concrete statements to some imaginary, non-specific future. Instead, he mines all the gaps, filleting the rhythmic flow and kaleidoscoping the groove into atomised inner grooves. And his melodic concept throws up another carefully considered, conceptual meta-syncopation. The journey between notes is more intriguing than the notes themselves: all those many-headed glissandi, those subtone soliloquies, those chordal rasps reconfiguring done-to-death melodic contours and dramatic arcs.
Turner yanks open space in the first few minutes. Then he slows the regularity of his push, and his cymbal attacks become more resonant and countable. His sensitivity to Coxhill's requirements regularly boils over into outbursts of off-the-leash cartoon violence and, after 13 minutes, his high-velocity tapdancing cowbells move faster than we can listen, impressive like Fred Astaire dancing up the walls. And how to resonate in sympathy with Coxhill's twisting melodic rubble on a drum kit? Turner invokes Duke Ellington's great 1960s drummer Sam Woodyard as skins are needed - and kneaded - to sing like a great soprano."-Philip Clark, The Wire 2010
Artist Biographies
• Show Bio for Lol Coxhill "George Lowen Coxhill (19 September 1932 - 10 July 2012), generally known as Lol Coxhill, was an English free improvising saxophonist and raconteur. He played the soprano or sopranino saxophone. Coxhill was born to George Compton Coxhill and Mabel Margaret Coxhill (née Motton) at Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK. He grew up in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, and bought his first saxophone in 1947. After national service he became a busy semi-professional musician, touring US airbases with Denzil Bailey's Afro-Cubists and the Graham Fleming Combo. In the 1960s he played with visiting American blues, soul and jazz musicians including Rufus Thomas, Mose Allison, Otis Spann, and Champion Jack Dupree. He also developed his practice of playing unaccompanied solo saxophone, often busking in informal performance situations. Other than his solo playing, he performed mostly as a sideman or as an equal collaborator, rather than a conventional leader - there was no regular Lol Coxhill Trio or Quartet as would normally be expected of a saxophonist. Instead he had many intermittent but long-lasting collaborations with like-minded musicians. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was a member of Canterbury scene bands Carol Grimes and Delivery and then Kevin Ayers and the Whole World. He became known for his solo playing and for work in duets with pianist Steve Miller and guitarist G. F. Fitzgerald. He was thought to have largely inspired Joni Mitchell's song "For Free", while busking solo on the old footbridge which formed part of the Hungerford Bridge between Waterloo and Charing Cross. Coxhill collaborated with other musicians including Mike Oldfield, Morgan Fisher (of Mott the Hoople), Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath and its musical descendant The Dedication Orchestra, Django Bates, the Damned, Hugh Metcalfe, Derek Bailey and performance art group Welfare State. He often worked in small collaborative groups with semi-humorous names such as the Johnny Rondo Duo or Trio (with pianist Dave Holland - not the bassist of the same name), the Melody Four (characteristically a trio, with Tony Coe and Steve Beresford), and The Recedents (with guitarist Mike Cooper and percussionist Roger Turner), known as such because the members were (in Coxhill's words) "all bald", though the name may additionally be a play on the American band the Residents. Typically these bands performed a mix of free improvisation interspersed with ballroom dance tunes and popular songs. There was humour throughout his music but he sometimes felt it necessary to tell audiences that the free playing was not intended as a joke. Coxhill was compere and occasional performer at the Bracknell Jazz Festival, and a raconteur as well as a musician; he often would introduce his music by saying the words, "what I am about to play you may not understand". It was following a performance at Bracknell that he recorded the melodramatic monologue Murder in the Air." ^ Hide Bio for Lol Coxhill • Show Bio for Roger Turner "Roger Turner (born 1946, Whitstable, England) is an English jazz percussionist. He plays the drumset, drums, and various percussion, and was brought up into the jazz and visual art cultures inhabited by his older brothers, playing drums from childhood in informal jazz contexts. Turner studied English literature and contemporary philosophy at Sussex University, playing with Chris Biscoe for the British Council in 1968, a first concert in improvisation. His move to London gave him contact with the first and second generation improvisers and he began to play primarily with Lol Coxhill, Gary Todd, John Russell, Hugh Davies, Steve Beresford, and Phil Minton. In the years immediately after 1974 his work was primarily concentrated on opening the way to a more personal percussion language. This was also a period of intense collaborations that structured many of his future approaches to music-making and saw the formation of two long-lasting acoustic duos with Phil Minton and with John Russell. Recordings of these duos document an extreme attention to timbre and pitch, as well as a constantly shifting speed that typified much of his work at the time. The duo with Minton toured extensively throughout Europe, USA and Canada. In 1979 he established CAW records with John Russell and Anthony Wood, and recorded the solo album The Blur Between focussing on single surface improvisations: a linear and reduced equipment approach he had started using with Carlos Zingaro and others in live performances. In addition to forming Trump music with Gary Todd to promote improvised music in London, he also involved himself in formative activities of the London Musicians Collective during this period. He was awarded Arts Council of Great Britain bursaries for solo percussion in 1980, and in 1983 for investigation into percussion with electronics. Extensive festival and club solo work followed, including the Bracknell Jazz Festival and the Brussels Festival of Percussion. In 1982 the trio The Recedents was formed with Lol Coxhill and Mike Cooper exploring the possibilities of electro-acoustic music, in which Turner initially played drumset and EMS Synthi A as a means of bending the sounds of various metal percussion instruments. This group, still existing, mixes song, jazz, punk/thrash, with acoustic detail in always shifting sonorities, and has worked throughout Europe, Canada and the UK, also recording for the French Nato label. Involvements with experimental rock musics and open-form song included extensive work in duo with Annette Peacock 1983-5, with whom he toured in Europe and Scandinavia. They recorded the album I have no feelings for Ironic. In 1984-5, he was invited for workshop residences at Alan Silva's Institute Art Culture Perception in Paris, where long-term collaborations with Alan began, culminating in The Tradition Trio with Johannes Bauer. This group was central to his explorations of forms of free jazz, an interest that has seen him working with musicians on both sides of the Atlantic (including Elton Dean, Irene Schweizer, Cecil Taylor, Roy Campbell, Henry Grimes, The Wardrobe Trio and Charles Gayle). Since the early 1980s his work has focussed on numerous projects with improvising musicians and groups, touring Europe, Australia, USA and Canada. Perhaps the most important of the later groups would be Konk Pack, formed in 1997, with Tim Hodgkinson and Thomas Lehn, a group whose use of volume and sense of detail continues the exploration of an electro-acoustic dynamic that forms one of his main musical concerns. This group has toured extensively in Europe and USA. He forged working relationships with Japanese musicians over the years: in the 1980s with Toshinori Kondo in the trio with John Russell, but since the mid-1990s in concerts and recordings with guitarist Kazuhisa Uchihashi in Austria, Japan, and U.K, and in the recent (2009) Hana-Bi three-day event in London that included the guitarist and the pianist Chino Shuichi. An active involvement in visual art has always been in dialogue with his music, and an inspiration for it. In the forefront of this is his work with Susan Turcot (the investigation/documentation of music and sound-drawing both in Europe and Canada-including the Being Rich box collection --, and music for her 2008 animation film Bitumen, Blood, and the Carbon Climb. His music for dance/performance includes work with Alexander Frangenheim's Concepts of Doing, Stuttgart ; Carlos Zingaro's Encontros projects in Lisbon and Macau; and most recently in the Josef Nadj production etc.etc. (premiered Vandeouvre, France, 2008) and which is a continuing involvement. In March 2009 he was invited to travel and perform on the Arctic island Svalbard, and was also invited to attend and play in the Comprovise event in Cologne, Germany in June 2009, set up to examine any possible relationship between improvisation and composition. Turner's music-making with international improvisers in ad hoc and group collaborations have since the 1970s to the present day included Toshinori Kondo, Derek Bailey, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, William Parker, Cecil Taylor, Otomo Yoshihide, Shelley Hirsch, Joelle Leandre, Keith Rowe, Ab Baars, Barry Guy, Barre Philips, Henry Grimes, Paul Rutherford, Gunter Christmann, Marilyn Crispell, Irene Schweizer, Frederik Rzewski, and Malcolm Goldstein." ^ Hide Bio for Roger Turner
11/29/2024
Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.
11/29/2024
Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.
Track Listing:
1. Paying Through The Nose 25:02
2. A Collar Counts 7:05
3. Tails That Wag 8:33
4. Groomed For The Job 17:30
EMANEM & psi
Improvised Music
Jazz
European Improvisation and Experimental Forms
London & UK Improv & Related Scenes
Duo Recordings
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