HT: Sonny Simmons with Tight Meat: HISTORIC!

HT: Sonny Simmons with Tight Meat: HISTORIC!

Harvest Time Presents
21st November 2007

Tight Meat Quartet with SONNY SIMMONS
(Featuring Sonny Simmons, David Keenan, Alex Neilson and John Edwards) (on Bo' Weavil/No-Fi)

Jooklo Duo (Qbico Records)

C Joynes(Leith Hill)

The Portland
Cambridge

£7/6.50 adv
Onsale 22/10/07 from http://www.harvesttime.co.uk exclusively.

After a blinding performance at this years Palimpsest as a 2 piece, Tight Meat return but this time with 2 added members including the legendary free jazz saxophonist Sonny Simmons. FIRST EVER UK TOUR... THIS IS A RARE OPPORTUNITY TO SEE THE MAN IN ACTION.

Tight Meat with Sonny Simmons.
Sonny Simmons – saxophone
David Keenan – saxophone
Alex Neilson – drums
George Lyle - bass
Huey ‘Sonny’ Simmons is one of the key figures to come out of the 1960s free jazz scene and his CV locates him at all the major epicentres, with recording sessions alongside John Coltrane’s rhythm section, Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison, as well as players like Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Anthony Braxton, Frank Lowe, Sunny Murray, Don Cherry and Prince Lasha. More significantly, in 1966 he led his own group through two absolutely flattening LPs for the legendary ESP-Disk label, then home to Albert Ayler, Frank Wright, Patty Waters and Sun Ra. Since the 60s he has fallen off the map several times, but since being briefly picked up by the Reprise label in the early-90s he has been considerably more visible, especially with his new group The Cosmosamatics. This historic hook-up with Tight Meat sees him connecting with a whole new generation of musicians who have accelerated the advanced modes of 1960s fire music as laid down by Simmons, Ayler et al by applying a punk-primitive post-noise mindset to their instant compositions for saxophone and drums. Unbelievably enough, this is Sonny’s first ever UK tour.
Tight Meat were formed by saxophonist David Keenan and drummer Alex Neilson in 2006 and since then have established themselves as “the most extreme free jazz group in the UK”. Their music operates at the kind of energy apex where force spontaneously gives birth to form. In early 2007 they released their debut album, Vanishing Fist, to widespread acclaim and later this year sees the follow-up album, Children Of Tomorrow And Tomorrow released by No-Fi. For this tour they will be joined by long-term bass partner George Lyle, who has been playing improvised music since the 1960s in the company of thinkers like Keith Rowe, Keith Tippett, Maggie Nicols, Lol Coxhill, Fred Frith and more. Alex Neilson has also worked with figures as diverse as Will Oldham, Jandek, Ali Roberts, Richard Youngs, Alistair Galbraith and The Red Krayola while David Keenan has worked with everyone from Heather Leigh Murray and Matthew Valentine through Paul Flaherty, Chris Corsano, Paul Hession (who he currently has a working duo with), Acid Mothers Temple, John Olson (Wolf Eyes), Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann. Keenan is also well known as a writer on avant garde and experimental music for The Wire and as the author of England’s Hidden Reverse, a secret history of the esoteric English underground, as well as for running the underground mailorder and record label Volcanic Tongue. Both David and Alex also play together in the psychedelic rock band Taurpis Tula alongside Heather Leigh Murray.

The Jooklo Duo In in 2004 with Virginia Genta on tenor sax and David Vanzan on drums, the duo had toured all Europe during the last year, and will see the first LP "Free Serpents" out on Qbico Records, September 2007.

During this time the way of live music has taken a higly defined shape: it became something which completely absorbs souls and bodies of who is living it, as a sort of mission written somewhere in the cosmic order. This asks lot of concentration and energies but give back the true birth of spirit.
The duo takes his main inspiration from the great black music (freejazz, funk, ethnic) of the past and today, and from the wild and primitive sounds that lives before and after human being. So the sounds' result is one of the possible ways of exploration into jazz lands.

... Everything started in the far 1994, when Virginia's dad gave her for present a "chalumeau", a special little clarinet in C, which was the first reed experience of Virginia. After some years she found her first saxophone (a really really old and crap alto) in an old things market. The first contact with black music was really back in the time, David was also a lover of afro music since really young and bought his first drum at the age of 15, but for some strange reasons didn't start immediately to play it. The first jazz music listenings was when the two guys were 16: an old LP of Ornette Coleman, a cassette of Charlie Parker and another one of Thelonoius Monk. During all this time, both Virginia and David were having their first approaches to experimental music, through a friend of them who made them know the improvisation scene. Playing together since they were 17, the two young musicians were developing a series of researches, most of those were mainly life experiences... After a beginning series of listenings, ideas and reharsals, the first shape of “Jooklo” saw the light in 2003, as a solo project by Virginia Genta. Quickly during the winter of 2004 the project started to turn into a stabile duo with David Vanzan on the drums with a first series of rudimental recordings shot in the bedroom. In february 2005 Virginia bought her first tenor sax and from there started for both the two musicians a long series of personal and deep explorations of the music, and not only.

Genta and Vanzan are also running Troglosound, underground music corporation for the production of records and concerts, collaborating with many international musicians and expanding their credo toward the borders of universe.

From 2006, the project had a "son": the new formation Neokarma Jooklo Trio which even turn soon in a Sextet taking a different and parallel way from Jooklo Duo, exploring more psychedelic and meditative lands.

Resources:
http://www.sonnysimmons.org
http://www.boweavilrecordings.com/tightmeat.html
http://www.jooklo.tk/