AMM WITH CHRISTIAN WOLFF
"The only possibility is to surrender to the ebb and flow of the pervasive group sound, until, finally you are lost inside it, mesmerised by it. You notice that the detail in the music is fascinating, no less the overall shape of the performance, which remains just out of grasp, like a landscape too powerful to assimilate in its entirety." Melody Maker (U.K.)
One of the longest-lasting and most influential avant-garde groups to emerge from the cultural and political ferment of the 1960s, AMM have remained singularly true to their radical experimental ethos and four decades later are still producing music that is as uncompromising as ever in its search for the genuinely new and liberating. AMM performances are deeply immersive, unforgettable and utterly unique experiences, in which performers and audiences alike discover new potentials of sound and human interaction.
One of the first groups to embrace total improvisation, free from any pre-imposed hierarchies or structures, AMM are pioneers of a "laminal" approach to group improvisation, in which the individual musicians explore the sonic possibilities of their own chosen instruments and the particular musical situation they find themselves in, collectively creating a complex, multi-layered music, rich in tension, event and texture.
Now consisting of a duo of founder member Eddie Prévost on percussion and pianist John Tilbury, AMM are joined for this concert by the composer Christian Wolff, a collaboration first heard in 1968 and which has been reprised several times since.
Eddie Prévost
Percussionist Eddie Prévost was one of the founder members of AMM in 1965. Before that, he had been a drummer in hard-bop bands in London, earning himself the epithet of "the Art Blakey of Brixton". Although AMM has been the main focus of Prévost's musical activities, his commitment to experimentation and restless musical curiosity has led to collaborations with many other artists in various contexts, including Evan Parker, Merce Cunningham, Jim O'Rourke, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Derek Bailey, Sonic Boom and Alan Wilkinson. Since 1999 he had convened a weekly improvisation workshop in London, which has had a great influence on the development of new music in the capital. An articulate and at times fierce polemicist, Prévost has published two books on the practice and politics of music. He also instigated and co-curates the Freedom of the City festival.
John Tilbury
Pianist John Tilbury permanently joined AMM in 1980, although he had been playing with them since the 1960s. As well as a distinguished improviser, Tilbury is also one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary classical music, and has made acclaimed recordings of the work of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Cornelius Cardew and others. The Hands of Caravaggio, his collaboration with the electroacoustic ensemble MIMEO, as been described as "the first great piano concerto of the 21st century". In recent years he has also turned to acting, making memorable performances of Samuel Beckett in particular. His biography of Cornelius Cardew was recently acclaimed by Richard Gott in The London Review of Books as "a sparkling account of a moment in British history when debates about music, art, poetry and revolutionary politics became the obsessive concern of a small group of talented practitioners".
Christian Wolff
Christian Wolff was born in 1934 in Nice, France. He has lived mostly the U.S. since 1941. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition, briefly, with John Cage. Though mostly self-taught as a composer, the work of John Cage , Morton Feldman, David Tudor and Earle Brown have been important to him, as well as long associations with Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski. A particular feature of his music is the freedom it allows performers at the time of performance as well as the variable results possible for any one particular piece, for which various new notations have been invented. A number of pieces have been used and commissioned by Merce Cunningham and his dance company. Wolff has been active as a performer and as an improviser - with Takehisa Kosugi, Keith Rowe, Steve Lacy, Christian Marclay, as well as with AMM. Wolff recently said of his work that it is motivated by his desire "to turn the making of music into a collaborative and transforming activity (performer into composer into listener into composer into performer, etc.), the cooperative character of the activity to the exact source of the music. To stir up, through the production of the music, a sense of social conditions in which we live and of how these might be changed."