DESCRIPTION:
The Vortex Jazz Club
5-5-2013

Alex Hawkins - piano
Alex Bonney - trumpet
Seymour Wright - alto sax
Guillaume Viltard - bass
Terry Day - drums

A night of improvised music led by Terry Day, a pioneer of the scene, and bringing together some of the brightest and most exciting young improvisers around. This will be the second outing for the group.

As a pioneer of the improvisation and free jazz movement, Day also formed a duo with Derek Bailey, was a regular member of Company & seminal groups such as People Band & Alterations. He also collaborated extensively with the second generation improvisers including Steve Beresford, John Russell & Nigel Combes

ALEXANDER HAWKINS / piano

Alexander Hawkins is a pianist, organist, composer and bandleader who is 'unlike anything else in modern creative music' (Ni Kantu) and whose recent work has reached a 'dazzling new apex' (Downbeat). Self-taught, he works in a vast array of creative contexts. His own highly distinctive soundworld is forged through the search to reconcile both his love of free improvisation and profound fascination with composition and structure.

ALEX BONNEY / Trumpet

Alex studied jazz compostition at Middlessex University under former Loose tubes members Eddie Parker, Chris Batchelor, Stuart Hall and also Nikki Iles.

He is based in London and plays in a variety of projects, Including Splice, electro acoustic trio Leverton Fox (who in 2010 played a UK tour supporting Norwegian band Humcrush), he has a critically acclaimed improvising duo with bassist Dave Kane, a jazz quartet quartet performing original compositions featuring Jeff Williams and a tribute to Albert Ayler project featuring Paul Dunmall and Mark Sanders.

GUILLAUME VILTARD / double bass

Born in 1975 in the North of Ivory Coast, Viltard grew up in the wild countryside with almost no music. Back in France, he played with many artists of the French underground improv scene, including dancers and poets as well as musicians.

After moving to London in late 2007, Viltard has worked with many of London's best improvisers, forming strong associations with the circle of musicians centred on Eddie Prevost's experimental workshop, becoming a mainstay of the London Improvisers Orchestra, and playing in a great free jazz trio with Tony Marsh and Shabaka Hutchings that was sadly curtailed by Marsh's untimely death.

It is this eclectic appetite for collaboration across the whole spectrum of improvised music as well as his resolutely unamplified and powerfully physical playing that marks Viltard out as one of the most interesting musicians to emerge from London's fertile improvised and experimental scene in the last few years.

SEYMOUR WRIGHT / saxophone

"Saxophonist Seymour Wright has emerged as the most important saxophonist of his generation. . . [He] shows a command of the saxophone which in contrast to most 'non-idiomatic' playing -- cynically translated as 'make your saxophone sound like anything other than a saxophone' -- has deep roots in a tradition of playing that goes back to Frankie Trumbauer, Coleman Hawkins and Willie Smith." - Brian Morton