Curious Ear

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Tuesday 11th June

Eugene Chadbourne +

Andrew Cheetham

Eugene by Todd Turner

Eugene Chadbourne (Doc Chad) is a world famous musician whose amazing guitar works in experimental rock, jazz, country, folk have seen him innovate and collaborate with the likes of Camper Van Beethoven, John Zorn, Aki Takase, Jimmy Carl Black, and the Violent Femmes and many others. Eugene is a music lover who listens to the world with an open mind, which is reflected in his sets. A typical one could include the music of Thelonious Monk, Eric Satie, Merle Haggard, Phil Ochs along with his own. He is backed up tonight by Curious Ear’s very own Andrew Cheetham on drumset.

plus splendid music from::

Matt Wand (sampler) +

Richard Harrison (percussion)

https://hot-air.bandcamp.com/

£6 on the door @ The Peer Hat, Faraday St, Manchester

Tuesday 4th June

Phil Minton + Roger Turner

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Phil Minton comes from Torquay. He played trumpet and sang with the Mike Westbrook Band in the early 60s – Then in dance and rock bands in Europe for the later of part of the decade. He returned to England in 1971, rejoining Westbrook and was involved in many of his projects until the mid 1980′s.

For most of the last forty years, Minton has been working as an improvising singer in lots of groups, orchestras, and situations. Numerous composers have written music especially for his extended vocal techniques. He has a quartet with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner and John Butcher, and ongoing duos, trios and quartets with above and many other musicians.

Since the eighties, His Feral Choir, where he voice-conducts workshops and concerts for anyone who wants to sing, has performed in over twenty countries.

“Phil Minton is best known for his startling vocal improvisations. On his new solo CD, this sensible looking man proffers 37 thin slices of his unfettered soul. Not long ago these croaks, burps, high-pitched exhalations, deep-throated drones and shreds of garbled half-language would have seen Minton either burnt or hailed as an emissary of God.” – Stewart Lee, The Sunday Times

https://www.philminton.co.uk/

Over decades Roger Turner has brought the renowned volcanic power and finely honed precision of his drum work to ensembles that have often forged real connections with musicians both sides of the Atlantic. In addition he has worked extensively in the microscopic laboratory of the acoustic duo situation where he acquired a highly developed sense of detail and of dynamic control. One of that select group of world-class players who have collectively redefined the language of contemporary percussion. In Turner’s hands minute inflections of tension can shape the group’s musical direction and galvanise a new level of audience experience.

http://www.roger-turner.com/

Sippy Cup

SIPPY CUP is a duo, a duo of two people, firstly a woman and then also a man, who operate in ALL MEDIA and under ALL KNOWN CONDITIONS, impervious, with anything to hand. Nature is not easily diverted or waylaid. Look at moss. Look at moss, for instance.

Yet this is not a calcified imperviousness. Nor is it an unreflective mechanical imperviousness seeking to falsely replicate objective processes as “expression”. Don’t get it twisted. It is the autonomous imperviousness of responsible decision-making, lodged like a gleaming shard right in the heart of chaos. A jaunty cap. For LOOK, they retain full access to their archaic reserves of spontaneity. Listen, little man! And these reserves appear seemingly inexhaustible. Inexcusable. It is a deep well. Ineluctable. A deep well, like a deep mossy well, for instance. And for this they are the envy of all around. Everyone that’s around.

Honkey Zontal Picnic

LUKE POOT & DARREN ADCOCK

£6 on the door @ Hive/Retro Bar, 78 Sackville St, Manchester 8pm doors

Thursday 18th April

Alex Ward’s Item 4

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The Alex Ward Item Series was launched in September 2017 at Cafe Oto with the debut performance by ITEM 10, Ward’s first foray into the world of composition for large ensemble. Now follows the second group in the series – ITEM 4, a quartet consisting of Alex on clarinet and guitar, Charlotte Keeffe on trumpet and flugelhorn, Otto Willberg on double bass and Andrew Lisle on drums. All the members were also participants in the Item 10 performance (the Item Series being conceived as a pool of musicians from which various sizes of ensemble can be drawn for different musical ends), and are amongst the most idiosyncratic and distinctive improvisers on the current UK scene. In writing for the group, Alex’s aim was to exert as minimal limitation on the players’ interaction and invention as possible, while still giving rise to a music distinct from that which would come about through pure improvisation – in this case, the means to achieving this was a conception of compositional materials as akin to emotional landmarks in an otherwise wide-open terrain… concentrates of melodic/harmonic information whose structural and affective characteristics resonate through the musical whole without controlling or defining it. This is the first perfromance of the group outside London.

https://sites.google.com/site/alexwardmusician/home