Fred arranges traditional tangos for Madrid-based Tango Orchestra, Ayahuasca Tango.
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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
Stevie Parle’s Dock Kitchen: music by Fred Thomas
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT_sJfTQuBU[/youtube]
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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
2013 marks the tenth anniversary of Stephen Cracknell’s project The Memory Band whose first EPs were released on his own Hungry Hill label in 2003, run in conjunction with Spinney Records. Cracknell’s intention from the outset was for the band to be “an imaginary band, built inside a computer and made flesh by the contributions of numerous musicians. Live an acoustic band of ever changing numbers and on record a new approach to traditional music”
That manifesto has been applied for a decade now. In 2004 their eponymous debut album was released, displaying an early fascination with landscape and place. There followed a prolonged period of live work, travelling all over the country and being embraced by the emerging independent festival circuit. The second album Apron Strings followed in 2006, licensed to Peacefrog in the UK and to Discristina Stairbuilders in the US.
After taking a sabbatical to produce and perform on “There Were Wolves” by The Accidental in 2008, Cracknell returned to re-cast the Memory Band, expanding its range of work, the number of musicians involved, and developing a number of specific side-projects. These included performances of the music and songs from Paul Giovanni’s score to classic film The Wicker Man as well as The Balearic Folk Orchestra; conceived in conjunction with Welsh film-maker Kieran Evans. And in 2012 Cracknell most recently revealed a new show entitled Folk on Film, continuing his fascination with soundtrack music. In 2011 The Memory Band found time to release its third album “Oh My Days” it’s most soulful album to date.
2013 sees the release of the fourth Memory Band “On The Chalk (Our Navigation of the Line of the Downs)” which was conceived by Cracknell in the downtime between live performances and marks a full circle “return to the machine” in it’s programmed style. After ten years of leading a band predicated upon the inevitability and necessity of change it stands as another turning point, another beginning on one of the oldest journeys we know.
The Memory Band features Fred Thomas on piano, percussion and arrangements.
Born into the great line of Kouyate Griots in southern Senegal, Kadialy plays original songs inspired by his traditional repertoire. Kadialy and Fred have been playing together for over 15 years, with Kadialy on kora and vocals, and Fred on double bass.
“Senegalese kora virtuoso/singer Kadialy Kouyate showcases his fleet-fingered skills on this mesmerising instrument, complementing it with his hauntingly, darkly beautiful voice, to create a Toumani Diabate-meets-Youssou N’Dour sound.” – Time Out
El Ultimo Tango is a quintet created by Eduardo Vassallo, Principal Cello of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, in 2002. The ensemble consists of flute, sax, cello, bass and piano and it specializes on Argentinian music with particular emphasis on the music of Astor Piazzolla. Fred Thomas was pianist from its formation in 2001 until 2007.
Buy their record here:
“The high spot is Adios Nonino, here given an unusual treatment with the opening half entrusted mostly to the piano, with the rest of the ensemble taking up the final half, quite the best arrangement of it that I have heard” – Gramophone
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
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Fred Thomas formed this band with singer Emine Pirhasen in 2006. Band members included Alexis Nuñez, Ben Moorhouse, Jiri Slavik, Johnny Brierley, Nat Keen & Jim Hart.
Listen here
Fred Thomas was Musical Director for Mor Karbasi between 2008 & 2011. He wrote the arrangements for Mor’s album “Daughter of the Spring”, released on Harmonia Mundi, as well as playing piano, bass, percussion and cello on the record and live on tour.
Listen here
FLY AGARIC draw their inspiration from the Kingdom Fungi, also known as the Mushroom World: these curious growths which appear within a very short space of time, pushing their way up through the undergrowth with great force, containing the heavy metals and elements deposited in the earth that produce the great range of colours found in different mushroom species, and which carry the spores – the vital, reproductive agents. Our vision of Jazz, inasmuch as we are jazz musicians by background (among other things), is a playful one and we plumb its depths of meaning only to have a good laugh at what we find. The impetus to form this band came from a long-standing network of friends to which we belong and was brought to fruition by a sort of ‘disturbing of the ground’ which resulted when we were kindly asked to perform to a large audience in Luxembourg. In this way too, the band is like a mushroom springing from the mycelium, a complex network of fibres, and often growing near footpaths and other byways. The material we play is mostly original and is composed by all members of the group.
Zac Gvi – Sax, Clarinet
Francesc Marco – Piano
Jiri Slavik – Double-bass
Fred Thomas – Percussion, Toys
Their debut album “In Search of Soma” was released in October 2012 on the F-IRE Collective Label. Buy it on iTunes here
Press:
“If you don’t know or haven’t flown with Agaric Airlines (AA) then you should check them out! Fresh, fun and butt kicking when called for. It’s a real pleasure to hear such excellent musicians in their deeper creative moods performing their own compositions.” – Barre Phillips
“… the group occasionally lets rip, but Fly Agaric sees no need to roar when you can whisper, or even mumble suggestively… The dead hand of the jazz solo is simply ignored as a device in favour of group music-making.” – Clive Bell, the WIRE
“An adventure in sound and performance is exactly what the quartet delivers on this powerful, eloquent album.” – Chris Parker
“In Search of Soma demonstrates a confident grip of jazz orthodoxies, but the LP is also eager to move beyond those realms. Fly Agaric understand the distinctive freedom that can be cultivated by scholarly discipline and attentiveness.” – The Skinny
“Chattering percussive effects, honking rumbustiousness, roiling fervour jostle promiscuously with (deceptive) calm and – on one track – the voice (from a speech on employment) of Nicolas Sarkozy to make up a fascinating set of multi-hued pieces, all delivered with extraordinary panache and assurance by a band that is clearly as open-eyed as it is open-eared.” – London Jazz News
“In Search Of Soma is, as its title suggests, an attempt at finding a new way of seeing – a contemporary jazz album that is less about jazz language and technique and much more about sound, concept and imaginative juxtapositions. Here are suggestions that Fly Agaric are a multi-faceted band with feeling and atmosphere in their music to match the pointed deconstructions.” – OMH Music
The Fred Thomas/Oren Marshall Duo, a London-based F-IRE Collective project, draw on their deep experience in classical, jazz and improv to conceive a music at times highly structured and composed, at others boundless and playful. Their performances employ an abundance of mood and colour, often through use of instrument preparation, travelling seamlessly from serenity to anarchy occasionally by way of humour.
Fred Thomas – (prepared) piano
Oren Marshall – tuba, orenophone
Listen to live recordings from F-IRE Klang Codex below:
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No shows booked at the moment.
Jamie Doe and Fred Thomas have been making music together since they were 11 years old.
The Magic Lantern is the musical moniker of British Australian singer-songwriter and composer Jamie Doe, an artist dedicated to examining the limitless depth of human experience in our search for meaning.
To Everything A Season is his unashamedly emotional fifth album written in the months following his daughters birth and his fathers death six weeks later. Describing their brief meeting in a dementia nursing home Jamie says:
“In that cathartic moment I saw myself in my father, and my daughter in me and I felt joy and grief in overlapping waves, beautiful and complicated, which continue to ripple outward. These songs are my attempt to make sense of this incredible time where both ends of the circle of life touched.”
To Everything A Season crackles with the quiet intensity of a family’s rawest and most intimate moments. Recorded live over over four days at the legendary La Buissonne studio in France by Gérard de Haro, the sound of To Everything A Season captures a vivid emotional immediacy, the richness of the ensemble arrangements and spirited improvisation belying the devastating songwriting. Working with a septet drawn from London’s thriving jazz scene To Everything A Season is both dreamy and direct, making use of the space around Jamie’s arresting voice to emphasis it’s emotional weight.
Lyrically, To Everything A Season is The Magic Lantern’s most powerful and accomplished achievement, a mature work that establishes Doe as one of the most confident lyricists writing today. With themes of loops and cycles threaded through the album, the lyric draws on references as diverse as the Bible, the records of John Coltrane and the helix structure of DNA.
Born in Australia, before moving to the UK at 12, Jamie adopted the stage name of The Magic Lantern and began writing songs while studying philosophy in Bristol. He lives in London and has released four full length albums and two EPs in addition to a compilation of other artists versions of his songs for the male suicide prevention charity CALM. He has toured the UK, Europe and Australia with acts as diverse as folk singer This is The Kit, Sam Lee, and Alabaster Deplume. He is a Professor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and teaches on the songwriting faculty at the Institute for Contemporary Music Performance.
The Magic Lantern has received praise from numerous publications including The Guardian, Songlines, Acoustic Magazine and Folk Radio UK as well as BBC Radio 1’s Huw Stephens, BBC 6 Music’s Lauren Laverne, Guy Garvey, Tom Robinson, BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction , Night Tracks and BBC Radio 2’s Jamie Cullum, Mark Radcliffe and Bob Harris among others.
To Everything A Season is out via Hectic Eclectic / La Buissonne Records
Fred Thomas’ album ‘The Beguilers’ weaves crafted song-writing into the narratives of poems by William Blake, Emily Brontë, William Shakespeare, James Joyce, Walter Savage Landor and Thomas Carew. Drawing on a wonderfully strange repository of musical influences – English folk, Joao Gilberto, Minimalism, the Aka Pigmies, The Beatles, and the English Madrigal School – Fred Thomas’ settings delicately bring the poets’ images and metaphors to life with finely wrought harmonies and luscious melodies. ‘The Beguilers’ features vocals from Ellie Rusbridge and instrumental contributions from Dave Shulman, Liam Byrne, and Malte Hage.
Buy ‘The Beguilers’ here
Music written, arranged and produced by Fred Thomas
Mixed by Fred Thomas & Alex Bonney
Mastered by Jon Astley
Artwork by Ted Allen
Fred Thomas – guitars, keyboards, double bass, gamba, cello percussion
Ellie Rusbridge – vocals
Dave Shulman – clarinets
Liam Byrne – viola da gamba
Malte Hage – electric bass
“a beautiful thing….The Beguilers is absolutely gorgeous” – Guy Garvey, BBC Radio 6
“A beautiful, unique album that dazzlingly recasts these poems in new and unexpected ways” – Nest Collective Hour,Resonance FM
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
A New Series presented by F-IRE Collective and Kammer Klang, curated by Fred Thomas.
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 Ars Subtilior composers featuring the exquisite mannerist notation of the time. This Codex, with it’s heart-shaped musical scores, staves representing the strings of a harp and riddle canons set out in 33-bar spirals, has become something of an obsession, hugely influencing my own composition. The experimentation of composers such as Solage, Johannes Ciconia and Baude Cordier gave birth to a brief effervescence of richness and complexity, a period of highly idiosyncratic art which left little in the way of posterity. In this respect it seems to me to have 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.
The F-IRE Klang Codex monthly concert series is an attempt to gather my musical thoughts and influences into one beautiful place: a church. Churches are profoundly peaceful spaces in which deep focus and concentration become a little easier, but they are also resonant spaces where, tired of grating PA systems and excessive volume, one can revel in rich, natural, acoustic resonance. The beautiful St. George-in-the-East Church is one of six Hawksmoor Churches in England and houses an organ and a very special Bluthner grand piano. It is also situated by the infamous Ratcliffe Highway, an old Roman Road known in the 19th century as home to, according to one visitor, the “lowest types of humanity of almost every nation”, as well as the opium dens frequented by Oscar Wilde, and was later the site of the historic anti-fascist Cable Street Riots.
In the programming of this concert series my own musical experiences have been combined with those of other F-IRE Collective and Kammer Klang members – in particular Lucy Railton – to compile an unwritten codex that represents our present-day activities in London. The music therein is full of bizarre and inescapable 21st Century contrasts – from Ars Subtilior to Griot music, from Gyorgy Kurtag to Hildegard von Bingen – and certainly has a more nebulous identity than the Chantilly Codex. That is an inexorable fact of our current musical lives, but the hope is that through the haze of eclecticism these strange combinations will be strangely illuminating.
Listen to live recordings from F-IRE Klang Codex below:
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No shows booked at the moment.
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