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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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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

www.clarasanabras.co.uk

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The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

– Oscar Wilde

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Fourteenth century France was a place of radical musical developments, particularly in rhythmic structures, polyphony and notation systems. The greatest testament to this style is the Chantilly Codex, a book of music by French and Italian ‘Ars Subtilior’ composers featuring the exquisite mannerist notation of the time. Containing heart-shaped musical scores and canons set out in 33-bar spirals, this codex is one of the most exquisite syntheses of two artforms: graphic design and musical notation. The experimentation of composers such as Solage) and Trebor (Robert backwards) gave birth to an effervescence of richness and strangeness, a radical pushing of the boundaries of notational complexity, a period of highly idiosyncratic art which left little in the way of posterity. In this respect it has the capacity to connect deeply with contemporary artists; this fleeting and isolated style, in leaving no immediate descendants, retains its perennial novelty and remains forever gilded in mystery.

 

Fred Thomas is currently preparing a recording of this music using contemporary recording techniques and a wide range of strange instruments, both old and new.

 

….more to come….

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWwmmuPCZAM[/youtube]

 

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6OAg27_8Nc&spfreload=10[/youtube]

 

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMtmw0cES5c&spfreload=10[/youtube]

 

 

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Fred arranges traditional tangos for Madrid-based Tango Orchestra, Ayahuasca Tango.

www.ayahuascatango.org

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp_a2eCcU8w&feature=related[/youtube]

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Stevie Parle’s Dock Kitchen: music by Fred Thomas

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT_sJfTQuBU[/youtube]

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmU5tpzU-Ic[/youtube]

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JOSwgfh-Tk[/youtube]

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtyGWV7genk[/youtube]

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqjT0zUi1k8[/youtube]

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0_6SfruFyg[/youtube]

 

Nicolas Sarkozy: music by Fly Agaric

[youtube]www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg1Cda8wN40&feature=plcp[/youtube]

 

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the lea

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The Irreverents is a 5-piece instrumental party funk band, an organic groove factory, providing hard hitting funk, sweet riffs & bouncy tunes for ass-shaking occasions.

Some of the music is composed by Francesc Marco; some of it is left unplanned. The band has been developing for some time its own way of collectively improvising music for dancing, focussing on groove and form, seeking to move away from the jazz-funk territory where solos and improvisation tend to detract from dancing. The band’s approach might be better desrcibed as spontaneous composition than improvisation as such. All the musicians are familiar with jazz in one of its incarnations and strongly rhythmical musical traditions from Africa and Latin America.

There are many influences. Groove, sound and attitude are inspired by old style funk bands such as the Meters, the JBs and Fela Kuti’s Orchestra. For composition and arrangement, the M-Base movement has paved the way for decades. On a local level , the F-IRE Collective, with which all band members have collaborated, and especially Barak Schmool’s Timeline, has helped and inspired the them to explore creative and meaningful rhythmical music.

Fred was electric-bassist with the band from when it was formed in 2006 until 2009.

www.alivism.com/projects/theirreverents

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k8uLSge7Vc&feature=relmfu[/youtube]

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JOSwgfh-Tk[/youtube]

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Fred Thomas Trio will be recording their debut album for ECM.

 

Fred Thomas – piano and transcriptions

Aisha Orazbayeva – violin

Lucy Railton – cello

 

Transcriptions by Fred Thomas, published and available to buy from Edition Wilhelm Hansen or Music Sales

 

“A brilliant young trio. With extreme sensitivity to colour and nuance, Fred Thomas has made these organ preludes into tiny character pieces for chamber ensemble” – BBC Music Magazine

“Thomas’ treatment of the Baroque score was modern but respectful. The pieces were full of colour and creativity making full use of the dynamic combination of violin, cello and piano…great concept” – Bachtrack