As a fundamental part of his practice, Fred Thomas plays ancient bowed strings instruments such as the viella and viola da gamba, as well as double bass, electric bass, guitar, cavaco and tenor banjo. A new album is coming soon!
Dance Suites is a solo J.S. Bach piano album by Fred Thomas.
“This is a fascinating and musicologically daring concept. The basic form of the Baroque dance suite is maintained, but the actual movements are pic’n’mixed from the Partitas and French Suites: we open with a Sinfonia (Partita No 2) before proceeding to an Allemande (French Suite No 5), thence to a Corrente (Partita No 6), and so on. Two such ‘complete’ suites are presented.
If it were not for the persuasive pianism and musicality of Thomas, this would be easy to dismiss. It says much that he is almost as persuasive as Perahia in the latter’s DG recording in the Allemande of the French Suite No 5. Thomas lists Rosalyn Tureck as principal influence and there is a line of purity from first to last, delivered with a markedly multivalent touch. Remarkable.” International Piano Magazine 5*****
“A boundary-blurring composer and improviser…beautifully ruminative…the serious care and thought characterising Thomas’ acoustic choices happily extend into his pianism” Gramophone Magazine
Buy it here.
ARTIST STATEMENT: It took me a long time to pluck up the courage to record some of Bach’s solo keyboard music. Its emotional, intellectual, technical and spiritual demands seemed overwhelming. Twice I started only to quit the idea, daunted and feeling unready. Then, in a moment of lucidity, I wondered: when you’re dealing with the most miraculous body of human creation in all the arts, when are you ever ready? Life is short. Bach himself was not prone to procrastination. He produced a quantity and quality of music some consider literally unbelievable.
I recorded alone with a huge piano, trying to coax the monster-machine into behaving well. Why the piano and not something ‘authentic’? For one thing, it’s my first instrument, but ultimately it’s a tired question, certainly in comparison with the sheer wonder of the music itself. In the end, the most scholarly ruminations on the abstractness of Bach, or on the piano’s range of articulation, or on the futility of pursuing authenticity in the absence of an authentic audience, just can’t match the sonic revelation that, played with some imagination, Bach sounds good on a tenor banjo – more on that soon.
His music is the most transcendent, all-encompassing, wise and child-like thing I know. In the words of Bernard Chazelle, “Bach’s music is soft and gentle, often suffused with piercing tenderness. If his work has an unmistakable child-like quality, it’s because its spiritual aspirations, borne of faith, joy, grace, and wonder, call for the deepest seriousness – and no one is more serious than the child”. I have the immovable feeling – knowledge, almost – that Bach fathoms and encircles everything.
John Cage considered music from the past useful only to the extent to which it leads to the creation of new things, a view far removed from the occasional dogmatism of the historical performance movement. Though I value both viewpoints, my aim lies somewhere in between: to derive something personal from a combination of historical enquiry and poetic imagination, using fantasy to supplement the fragmentary knowledge that contextual study reveals. Furthermore, the violation of chronology – my choice and ordering of tracks – is an attempt to give this record narrative force.
Creative recording techniques also played an aesthetic role. Using many microphones and basing their blended combinations on inherent musical character enables each movement to inhabit a unique soundworld. This process became genuinely interpretative, post-production. Although relatively under-explored in classical music recording (where the goal is often to reproduce the ‘natural’ sound of a live concert), my aim is to treat recording technique as an independent, exploratory art form.
Recorded at the Royal Academy of Music, London, March and June 2015
Engineered and Mixed by Alex Bonney
Mastered by Thomas Vingtrinier, Paris
Produced by Fred Thomas
Piano technician: Clive Ackroyd
Piano: Steinway D
Fred Thomas works regularly as Musical Director with Shakespeare’s Globe. He was MD for the Globe’s worldwide tour of ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ in 2016, as well as ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, ‘Twelfth Night’ & ‘Titus Andronicus’. Other productions include the National Theatre’s “Pericles’ and the Globe’s ‘After Edward’. Fred has collaborated with, amongst others, Emma Rice, Michelle Terry, Nina Steiger, Nick Bagnall, Jude Christian and James Fortune.
“Launce is a particular delight, especially in her interactions with multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas who she claims as her dog Crab” inthecheapseats.co.uk
Saied Silbak – oud, vocals, composition
Fred Thomas – double bass, electric bass
Saied Silbak is a Palestinian composer and oud player born in Shafaa`mr, in the lower Galilee of occupied Palestine. He began training in classical piano at the age of four, before moving onto the oud in his early teens to delve deep into the nuances at the base of Arabic music. Silbak has a unique understanding of different types of music, from Arabic, Turkish and Indian to classical Western styles.
His signature sound, created through his artful ability to fuse these styles together, has seen him perform around the world at festivals and concert series in the UK, Belgium, France, Palestine, Morocco, Argentina and beyond.
In recent years he has worked with many artists on interdisciplinary projects and has been involved in educational and community work, developing a politically and socially engaged practice.
This jazz trio features Fred Thomas on double bass, pianist Liam Noble and percussionists Dudu Kouate or Gerry Hemingway.
Fred Thomas & Phaedra Ensemble have been collaborating for the past six years. Thomas’ composition ‘Taking a Nap, I Pound the Rice’, for string quartet, percussion, prepared piano and spoken voice, was recorded and released by Phaedra in 2022.
The EP features Phaedra Ensemble string quartet, Maurizio Ravalico (percussion), Jill Feldman (voice) and Fred Thomas on prepared piano. The five-movement piece sets to music texts drawn from various writings of Thelonious Monk, Anton Webern, J.A. Baker, Morton Feldman and John Cage, and then re-assembled into poems by Fred Thomas.
Founded in 2014 by violinist Phillip Granell, Phaedra has evolved from its inception as a string quartet to a larger collective of like-minded performers, drawn from London’s diverse musical landscape.
2023 sees the culmination of their collaboration with the extraordinary vocalist/composer Meredith Monk, with the forthcoming release of their debut album featuring the first recording of her only string quartet Stringsongs plus two works for larger ensemble.
Previous UK performances include Kings Place, The Barbican, Kammer Klang @ Cafe Oto, Royal Festival Hall & Purcell Rooms, The Royal Opera House, and internationally at NYU Arts Center (Abu Dhabi), and La Seine Musicale (Paris). They have been broadcast and performed live on BBC Radio 3 and Resonance.fm.
Their ongoing VOX project explores the radical use of the human voice in music and performance, leading to a dozen new collaborative commissions and two concert series, featuring guest artists such as Heloise Werner (The Hermes Experiment), Neil Luck, Laura Moody and Bastard Assignments, alongside performances of Jennifer Walshe, Florent Ghys, Cassandra Miller, David Lang, and many others.
In 2017, they recreated two albums for live strings with Mercury Award-nominated singer Susheela Raman and performed internationally with Gondrong Gunarto Gamelan (Java) and Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwals (Pakistan)
Since 2015, they have worked with multi-sensory arts collective Bittersuite, creating large-scale immersive experiences, including Held, a home listening experience developed in response to the Covid-19 crisis.
Fred Thomas curates an ongoing series at the legendary Sands Films Studios in Rotherhithe, inviting artists he admires to play duos or small ensembles followed by informal interviews delving into their artistic practice. Featuring Elizabeth Kenny, Abel Selaocoe, Kit Downes, Dudu Kouate, Gerry Hemmingway, Liam Noble, The Magic Lantern, Barnaby Keen, Saied Silbak, Julia Biel, Kadialy Kouyate, Preetha Narayana, Alice Zawadzki, Maurizio Ravalico, Ewan Bleach, Laura Jurd, Rob Luft, Elina Duni and Misha Mullov-Abbado. Production by Sands Films and Olivier Stockman.
Multi-instrumentalists Ruth Bruckner and Fred Thomas met in Tuscany in 2019, immediately connecting through their love of medieval music and in particular the viella. Performing on combinations of strings, recorders, prepared piano, tenor banjo and voice, their duo is dedicated to recording experiments, the Chantilly Codex, Bach, song-writing, extended techniques and free improv. Their first release is an exquisite madrigal composed by the medieval composer and theorist Paolo da Firenze.
Buy ‘Un Pellegrin Uccel” on Bandcamp here
ECM artists Speake/Iverson/Thomas join forces with the extraordinary drummer James Maddren.
Pianist, composer, and writer Ethan Iverson was a founding member of The Bad Plus, a game-changing collective with Reid Anderson and David King. The New York Times called TBP “…Better than anyone at melding the sensibilities of post-60’s jazz and indie rock.” Iverson also has been in the critically-acclaimed Billy Hart quartet for well over a decade and occasionally performs with an elder statesman like Albert “Tootie” Heath or Ron Carter. For over 15 years Iverson’s website Do the Math has been a repository of musician-to-musician interviews and analysis, surely one reason Time Out New York selected Iverson as one of 25 essential New York jazz icons: “Perhaps NYC’s most thoughtful and passionate student of jazz tradition – the most admirable sort of artist-scholar.”
Martin Speake – alto saxophone
Ethan Iverson – piano
James Maddren – drums
Fred Thomas – double bass
Buy the album on Bandcamp
“Martin Speake is one of the most interesting and rewarding alto saxophonists now playing jazz on any continent” Jazz Times
“Speake is a strikingly talented improviser with a seemingly bottomless well of inspiration” Encyclopedia of Popular Music
“Speake’s playing can be as enigmatic as his writing. The lyricism and subtlety of both his written and improvised melodies sometimes unfold so gradually that one needs to take a mental step back to absorb it all” All About Jazz
Monk Spent Youth is a celebration of the music, the life and the spirit of Thelonious Monk. The original line up formed in 2014 and released their debut recording, “Monk Spent Youth”, in 2019. Buy it here on Bandcamp.
Zac Gvirtzman – piano, bass clarinet, organ, toy piano
Ben Davis – cello
Fred Thomas – drums, bass, prepared piano
Bittersuite are a company exploring how to re-imagine the classical concert through the senses.
They have developed two original concerts – one for Debussy’s String Quartet in G and one for an original commission with composer, Tanya Auclair. At their core they are about collaboration, experimentation and playing with the senses as a way to enhance the experience of listening to music.
Their concerts to date have been one-to-one experiences. A performer blindfolds an audience member and leads them through a powerful sensory experience, in which gourmet tastes, bespoke scents, choreographed touch and movement have been carefully designed to enhance and lie in harmony with the music.
Bittersuite commissioned Fred Thomas to write a piece for String Quartet and Percussion in 2017 for their program “Tapestries”.
Complex counterpoint – the combination of multiple independent melodies into a single harmonic texture – has been noticeably under-explored in jazz. This project explores improvised, spontaneous counterpoint, seeking inspiration from one of the richest resources in all of Western music history: Baroque polyphony.
Transplanting polyphonic schemes (derived from J.S. Bach) to the most classic jazz standards illuminates an un-trodden path to this fundamental songbook repertoire, one in which the culture of consecutive solos is wholly renounced. This quintet of team players synthesise polyphony and improvisation in their approach to the jazz tradition. Immersed in a liquid texture two hundred years older than the birth of jazz, these astonishingly malleable songs are heard afresh as intertwining melodies coalescing into a harmonious whole.
Fred Thomas (ECM, Brian Eno) – double bass
Martin Speake (ECM, Paul Motian) – alto saxophone
Mick Foster (Cleo Lain, LPO) – baritone saxophone
Phil Stevenson (Fofoulah, Iness Mezel) – electric guitar
Phelan Burgoyne (Dave Holland, Kenny Wheeler) – drums
Album coming soon.
Fred has worked with Filter since 2014 and has toured USA, India and the UK with ‘Twelfth Night’.
Innovative sound and music based theatre company Filter’s cult version of Twelfth Night re-imagines the madness of Illyria as a chaotic gig in which the audience becomes complict in the action.
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“Filter is converened with passion, conflict, truth and trust, and the technological mechanics of how its members communicate all these are laid bare” – Adrian Hilton, The Spectator
“Sound Maestros” – Time Out
“Work that dazzles the eye, enchants the ear, and stimulates both the mind and heart” – Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph
“Filter is an experimental company famed for its sonic virtuosity” – Michael Billington, The Guardian
“Filter’s sheer boldness of invention, its ground-breaking use of sound, makes it a company to watch.” – Rachel Halliburton, Evening Standard
Living Standards is the first album by the duo of Fred Thomas and Zac Gvi and represents a landmark in the development of their collaborative work. The album refines and concentrates an imaginative approach to interpreting well-played repertoire from the jazz songbook, breathing new life into songs whose essential beauty rings true through the passage of time. Featuring luminaries of the burgeoning London Jazz scene Ben Davis – cello (Basquait Strings), Johnny Brierley – bass (Outhouse Ruhabi) and Louisa Jones – vocals (Man Overboard), “Living Standards” is out on the F-IRE Label as of January 2014. Buy it HERE or listen on Spotify
Drawing on their experience of having played together in various contexts (Fly Agaric, the Magic Lantern, The Irreverents), Thomas and Gvi turn their attention to the music that brought them together in the first place – the Jazz Standard – bringing to the feast a wealth of new ideas and abilities gleaned from wide-ranging listening, playing and composing. Here the focus of the material is purely on songs written for the music hall and later re-interpreted by many of the great jazz musicians. However, the duos and trios recorded on this record make their own mark on the tunes, playfully re-inventing them while always maintaining a deep sense of respect for the songs, their characters and their stories.
This record owes a particular debt to Paul Motian, especially his recordings of standards with the Paul Motian Trio and “On Broadway Vols. 1-5”, whose supremely melodic sensibility is a trailblazing vision into both the deepest past and the brightest future of Jazz. The whole approach to dynamic group improvisation on the present recording takes its cue from that Motian’s impeccable aesthetic, while in Louisa Jones’ harrowingly sincere and unabashed voice there is a clear echo of the spirit of Billie Holiday. In their polyphonic, many-voiced interplay, Thomas and Gvi celebrate the influence of one more shared hero of theirs, Lennie Tristano, whose jazz inventions never cease to sound fresh and intricate.
The recording was engineered and produced by long-time collaborator and friend Alex Bonney (Bill Frisell, Evan Parker) at the exquisite Hawksmoor church St. Georges-in-the-East in Shadwell. This album is dedicated to the memory of Fergus Read (1965-2006) whose teaching lives on. Many thanks to Tony Fisher for his amazing CD graphics.
Fred Thomas – bass, drums, piano
Zac Gvirtzman – piano, saxophone
Louisa Jones – vocals
Johnny Brierley – double-bass
Ben Davis – cello
“Fred Thomas and Zac Gvi twist songbook classics as on their new record ‘Living Standards” – Timeout
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Sioux and Gypsy blood runs through Clara’s veins. An exceptionally versatile musician, captivating performer and one of the most original singer-songwriters to emerge from the East London scene, Clara brings a refreshing twist to the folk tradition creating an unmistakable bluesy sound with a continental twist. Carried by the power of a virtuosic voice, her adventurous melodies take unexpected, serpentine turns, her English lyrics breaking into Spanish, French, Catalan as spellbinding stories unfold. She accompanies herself on baroque guitar, charango, Indian harmonium, telecaster, mandolin, a collection as varied as her background.
Born in France, raised in Barcelona, she has grown, after a lengthy tenure in the metropolis, into a Londoner.
In an impressive back catalogue of recordings, theatre and screen credits, Clara features in many movie soundtracks including “The Hobbit”, “Snow White and the Huntsman”, “The Hunger Games” and has appeared at many international festivals, including Glastonbury, The London Jazz Festival and Womad, and mingled with artists from all disciplines: she collaborated with Natacha Atlas, Nizlopi’s frontman Luke Concannon, she appears on screen alongside Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice movie (Mike Radford 2004), on radio with Bill Nighy in the BBC Radio 3 play The Don, on stage with director Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre and in concert under the guidance of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the forefather of electronica. She is also the featured singer in the forthcoming Hollywood movie For Greater Glory about the Mexican Cristeros War, with music by James Horner (Titanic), cast including Peter O’Toole, Andy Garcia, Eva Longoria, Ruben Blades. Clara’s song “Nada Igual”, as heard in La Reina del Sur was no. 1 in the iTunes charts (Mexico) in June 2011.
Since she burst into the global music scene in 2006, with the highly acclaimed album “Clara & The Real Lowdown “, produced by maverick producer and composer Harvey Brough, they’ve recorded another two albums: ”Hopetown House” featuring The Real Lowdown, a collective of the finest folk, jazz and world musicians in London, and “The Emblem”, released in February 2012.
“Her sound sits richly somewhere between Camille, Mariza and Joanna Newsom – a gorgeous place to be” – UNCUT Magazine
“visionary… this is something different, something special” – 17 SECONDS
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