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#2: taupe return

20/8/2021

After a couple of months away from this website, I find myself lucky to be in a position of writing an entry shortly after a tiring, fulfilling and much-needed three weeks of immersive activity with Taupe. For those that may not know, Taupe is a noisy-riffy-improvised-jazzish trio founded during my undergraduate in Newcastle. I play saxophone with effects, and get to stare into the whites of Mike Parr-Burman and Adam Stapleford’s eyes throughout. We’ve been going now for not far off ten years, and it’s in many ways my first love with respect to the life of original music making I’m still scrabbling around trying to piece together.

The music we make is either spontaneous and highly interactive, or collaboratively pre-composed – often with a lot of time devoted to various minutiae. We live in three different cities and COVID-19 left the group unable to do much; even after our album tour for Not Blue Light was cancelled, various attempts at online collaborating never seemed to spark the imagination in the way we had hoped. Oftentimes the latency was frankly just too noticeable, and facilitated for an even more sluggish reaction speed than I'm often guilty of when we're just sharing a stage...

Photo: Harrison Reid

Score Excerpt from Foreign Bodies/Ritual Taxonomy by James Joys

Considering the above, it was a delight to spend the first week of August at the Sage Gateshead as part of their summer studios programme where we had a room for a week to rehearse, write and generally reignite the artistic flame. The rehearsal period was an intense experience after so long away, as was driving the hire van into central Manchester for our first gig since October 2019. The show at the Peer Hat was a proper sweaty basement evening, and the first of four shows across four very different venues. Any musician friends out there, do check out Colchester Arts Centre, The Vortex, and Kazimier Stockroom. Great venues, great cities, great people!

The final leg of this three-part Taupe-stravaganza was a recording in Glasgow’s Dystopia Studios. It began life as a funeral parlour and is now overseen by Luigi Pasquini who knows how to make things sound good but, to my knowledge, hasn't had much past involvement with corpses.. This recording was a first for Taupe as we were recording scores to form part of James Joys’ new work Foreign Bodies/Ritual Taxonomy. The pieces were, flatteringly, written with us in mind and are often a mixture of written instructions, melodic fragments, visual stimulus, certain harmonic trajectories or any/all of the above. It was often a wrenchingly moving texture to be immersed in and to add to; the scores themselves are as beautiful to look at as the genuine excerpts from the UK’s immigration policy and asylum paperwork are horrendous to read. I can only hope that we have done it some justice, and I can’t wait to hear it once James has done his thing and sent them to band-friend and experimental turntablist Mariam Rezaei.

I’d also urge people to check out Marco Woolf’s new release on Phlexx Records. I was asked to improvise some saxophone a long while ago, and hearing the tapestry he has woven together is quite something. Other new things from friends include Chloe Foy’s amazing new record Where Shall We Begin. The album launch gig was quite special but was also my first time being surrounded by people I knew for a long while so I had to run away as soon as it was finished. Here’s a more public ‘thank you for inviting me, and congratulations!’ than I could muster at the time.

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#1: return to gigs! (and friends' releases)

10/6/2021

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One month in to this whole 'person with a website' thing and it occurs to me that the having of a blog is probably insufficient unless I contribute to it. With this attitude in mind, I encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter on the homepage in case I do one of those sometime, too.

It's been a mixed month, with as many joyous re-openings, first-gig-backs and other life affirming moments tempered by the, still inevitable feeling, cancellations and postponements. Still, remiss to complain given the relatively good health I've benefited from this year (even whilst with COVID) and my receiving of dose one a couple of days ago!

Agbeko on the Bandwagon

Agbeko's return was a joy - albeit limited to two 15-minute sets. The team at Manchester's Band on the Wall did a brilliant job with the Bandwagon project at Stockport Market, and re-experiencing the shared energy, synchronous glint-in-the-eye happiness and the profound fulfillment that you get when riding the wave of 10 fellow musicians is something I've sorely missed!

We were also very lucky to be joined by Mali Hayes, on guest vocals. She's brilliant, and you can pre-order her brand new single on the equally brand new Band on the Wall Recordings here. Sadly our full length headline show at the Blues Kitchen in Manchester has been postponed for Covid reasons, but we're working on a reschedule.

Last weekend saw my participation Jazz North's Back to Live residency. I was playing with John Pope Quintet, and shared a bill with Nishla Smith and her band. It was so good to get playing again and hanging out with musicians! A dose of normality. I'm looking forward to Manchester Jazz Festival this weekend. Faye MacCalman also plays in JPQ, and Archipelago's new album is released later this month. Here's the preorder link for that! Faye is also performing a solo slot for Taupe's Newcastle return on 3rd September! Buy tickets!

The next few weeks consist of finally realising a commission from Lancaster Jazz Festival. I have only ever really released my compositions under the guise of various bands I am in, or founded. So to be asked to write something in the likelihood it will be put out under my own name is a daunting one...but I'm looking forward to finally getting stuck in. In the interested of transparency, I owe my apologies to LJF for the delay. The time I'd initially put aside to focus on this was dominated by my household all coming down with Covid. So pleased to finally go for it!

We're also finalising the mixing for a new Easy Rollers album, recorded in a nice big room during gaps in lockdown. It's a real step up from our previous efforts, and offers some evidence that every four cycles of the moon I can read chord symbols. So keep an eye and ear out for us announcing more about that.

Stay safe x

Buy tickets for this gig. G'wan.

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Welcome!

6/5/2020

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Hello there, and welcome to my incredibly belatedly-created website. After a year of postponements, reschedules, cancellations and periods of self-isolation it feels as if the tide is slowly turning towards a world where art, community and shared experience can, once again, exist in a physically palpable sense.

I intend to use this page to keep people astride of releases, upcoming tours, interesting rehearsal progress and perhaps the odd point towards something I've been listening/reading/watching that I think might be of interest to others. So if you find yourself being 'interested' in me at all then 1) get help! and 2) head to the homepage and subscribe to the newsletter. It'll mostly be me pointing out new releases or new posts on this page.

(Also, I was told by a friend of mine who works in Search Engine Optimisation that keeping a blog, however humble, is a huge help. So y'know...there's that too.)

Crediting photos on Weebly-made website is a little difficult. So massive thanks to Daphne Mee, Victoria Wai, Becky Cleasby and Criss Roden for their photos. Please give their other work a look, and if you're interested in working with them then those names serve as hyperlinks to get in touch. Apart from Criss, but he's a good friend and I'll hook you up.

For now, I hope you enjoy clicking through the groups on this page and listening to their music. Thank you for the support, and I'm looking forward to the future!

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