Ilpo Väisänen @ Cafe Oto, London, 19th May 2019

source: flickr 📸: Fabio Lugaro

Valentina Goncharova at Café Oto, London November’22

#valentinagoncharova

#cafeoto

#gigphotography

This'll be good.

London debut of Swordman Kitala, plus me, plus Waqwaq Kingdom in support of 5 years of Phantom Limb.

Check out our EP:

Maggie Nicols "Are You Ready / Sans Papiers" - piano-accompanied songs originally streamed for Cafe OTO

First physical solo release from legendary vocal improvisor, dancer, and performer Maggie Nicols, and the follow up to her brilliant 'Creative Contradiction’ (Takuroku 2020).

While she might be best known as an improviser, most notably in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Feminist Improvising Group and more recently with the likes of 'Les Diaboliques', Maggie Nicols’ talents stretch into song, dance, poetry, performance and composition. Whilst Cafe OTO was shut over lockdown we invited Maggie Nicols to follow up her brilliant Creative Contradiction’ (Takuroku 2020) with some time spent singing alone at the piano. The release comprises an LP of songs and a 2CD edition including a companion disk of free improvised meditations entitled, ‘Whatever Arises.’ The LP and 2CD contain different material.

The Necks - Café Oto, London, 4 April 2024

It’s possible that there is not a band that is more Café Oto than the Necks. The Australian three piece have been around since 1987, initially happily improvising together in Sydney. Keyboard player Chris Abrahams and bassist Lloyd Swanton still live within 100km of their original base but drummer Tony Buck has lived in Berlin for over 20 years. Pre-pandemic, they’d get together in Australia to…

View On WordPress

Tasos Stamou @ Cafe Oto, Mike Cooper's 70 RPM birthday concert

Pat Thomas & XT (Seymour Wright, Paul Abbott), Will Holder — “Akisakila” / Attitudes of Preparation [Mountains, Oceans, Trees] (Edition Gamut)

In August 2018, Café OTO presented a tribute to the recently departed Cecil Taylor with discussions of his life and work, a poetry reading by Evie Ward influenced by Taylor’s writings, and a performance by pianist Pat Thomas and XT (Seymour Wright on “actual & potential saxophone” and Paul Abbott on “drums and synthetic sounds”). In preparation for the event, Thomas, Wright and Abbott spent some time listening and discussing Taylor’s 1973 trio recording Akisakila featuring Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille (surprisingly, as far as I can tell, the only piano, sax, drums trio recording aside from Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come recorded a decade earlier with Sunny Murray.) The three prepared an audio track which they describe as “‘unit structures’ made up of various voices of Cecil’s influences and associates (real and imaginary), and at the end the voice of Cecil himself” which they used as an open framework for the performance. They noted that “In our p(l)aying some sort of ‘tribute’ we hoped to create a space in which to think about, interrogate, acknowledge, embody and feel the nature of influence: his ‘attitudes of preparation’.”

It’s unusual to start a discussion of a recording with a focus on the LP cover. But here, the design of the four panels of the gatefold cover in collaboration with artist-typographer Will Holder (F.R.David) is fully integrated into the strategies the three have taken with the music. Transcriptions of interviews with the musicians along with an interview with Taylor by Eric Plaks are fractured, fragmented, and woven together into an expansive study in syntactical abstraction. Ideas are introduced and interrupted mid-stream. Points of view shift in kaleidoscopic manner from line to line. At first this is all bemusing, but patience reveals shifting threads and repeated tropes which offer inroads into the strategies the three took. Phrases like “[an attempt] to re-situate ourselves, our understanding of the tools and of history,” “[developing] a model of playing repertoire” or “[creating an] ecosystem, in which everything is mutable” provides an insight into the trio’s approach toward paying homage to Taylor’s music while developing personal inroads to that lineage. Quotes that appear such as “you’ve really got to have a melodic concept and the same with Cecil”, “the music is so independent in how it’s organized” and “Cecil saved the piano in contemporary jazz” provide a further glimpse into the “unit structures” explored by Thomas, Wright, and Abbott. 

As Taylor notes in an interview that is woven into both the LP cover and the audio track prepared by the trio, “It seems to me that there are attitudes of preparation. Those attitudes of preparation include: if you’re going to play an instrument it could include researching the past masters of that instrument; the music that they made; but more than that the methodological concepts that produced that music.” Seymour Wright reflects that “For me, Attitudes of Preparation [...] is very much concerned with the idea of influence and how ideas and influences move across mediums (not just music), materials, ideas, bodies, (communities of) practices. And seeing how it feels — somatically, emotionally to move towards a certain way of playing. It was completely improvised, no rehearsals, minimal discussion in advance, we checked the sound and that was that. It was very much a one-off event — not concerned with developing a repertoire, but with an instance of celebratory reflection… Akisakila is such a powerful and important record it felt like the correct way in.”

 Which brings things to the music itself. Over the course of 75 minutes, Thomas, Wright, and Abbott dig deeply into the music of Taylor, Lyons and Cyrille, exploring their notions of “a new grammar” and “alternative vocabulary” (phrases referenced in the graphic cover). Starting out with a looped and abraded grab of the announcer’s introduction to the original album, the three dive straight in to the brewing maelstrom. Thomas digs deep into Taylor’s melodic concepts, or as noted in the cover “the idea of melody,” going beyond the surface of Val Wilmer’s description of Taylor’s “eighty-eight tuned drums.” He refracts the coursing torrents with splintered clusters of motivic intricacy. Jimmy Lyons’ role in shaping Taylor’s music is often underplayed, but Wright fully absorbs how central he was, referencing “the ‘alto’-ness of [Lyons’ playing] which to me is important. He is (to me) one of a wave of alto saxophonists after Charlie Parker (and Bostic) who moved on, and responded, in different saxophonic directions: Ornette, Jimmy Lyons, Braxton, Threadgill, Roscoe, Hemphill, Lake, a crucial part of balancing the logic of how ideas move.” 

Wright and Abbot have honed their playing together In duo and in collaborations ranging from RP Boo to Container to performance artist Anne Gillis, deconstructing the notion of beats, pulse and flow, melding alto sax and drums with electronics and amplification with a lithe, volatile sense of time and structure. In this collaboration, the two zero in on the piano/sax/drums vocabulary developed by Taylor, Lyons and Cyrille and apply that same sensibility. Wright’s playing builds from Lyons’ structural invention with searing lines that hurdle along with potent focus. His strident tone and keen utilization of split multiphonics provides a critical foil to Thomas’ harmonic inventions. It’s particularly intriguing to hear Abbott within the prominent jazz inflections of the performance. Here, he explodes pulse and time while charting dynamic inroads into the propulsive momentum of the trio. His use of electronic shadings is also effective in integrating the prepared audio track woven through the performance. 

The final section of the performance centers around a taped conversation between Taylor and Eric Plaks. Here, Taylor’s voice and distinctive vocal phrasing comes to the fore with pared back piano punctuation by Thomas. Then, the music simply cuts as the conversation ends. This final framing pays distinctive homage while wrapping the music back around to the enveloping graphics of the cover, tying the entire package together. Since the Oto concert, the trio has continued the project, expanding on the initial impetus. Wright sums it up this way. “We played short (20 minute) sets of 'Cecil material' on the first night in Zurich and at OTO, as a way of revisiting, briefly (and very rewardingly) that material — but the other music was an on-going development of the XT/Pat trio, all three of us using acoustic and electronic sound… The project was really about exploring I think, an investigation of ideas. And still is. The recent trio concerts were the same, but concerned with how Pat, Paul and I can make our own music, and work into the future.” One looks forward to how this collaboration will continue to evolve their “ecosystem, in which everything is mutable.” 

Michael Rosenstein

ame's R&D on DIY culture, sustainability and future.

Huddersfield organisers ame have released this 44 page booklet compiling their research into the UK DIY scene, its future and sustainability. It features quotes from Firas Khnaisser, Ali Robertson & many more and you can get one here.

Peter Brötzmann Cafe Oto, London, in February 2023.

source: The Guardian 📸: Dawid Laskowski

oh theres a boba place downtown now apparentlyy

Swordman Kitala UK/Europe debut!

Excited to be going on my first ever tour as a musician in the company of this chap. We will be bringing Ugandan underground-style MC fire and Godzilla-heavy beats and bass.

See venue websites for tickets and more details.

Extra psyched to be joined by Blue Tapes' own Ashtray Navigations for the Leeds date! We will be debuting new material from our forthcoming LP plus these old favourites: https://phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/kaiju-kitala

Get in we’re are going to CAFE OTO 😍😁

Enji - Cafe Oto, Hackney, 11 February 2024

A wonderful of evening of jazz at Cafe Oto with Mongolian singer Enji - yes, really...

Living in London, you’re often reminded just how many people from unexpected places around the world live in the city. Cafe Oto is a magnet for these sorts of diasporas, offering a night out for the geographically displaced. Last year I enjoyed Malian band L’Etran De L’Air, a fantastic night of African guitar pop. This time round, it is the turn of Enji, a jazz singer from Mongolia, now based in…

View On WordPress

Keiji Haino with a mic’d up ?Slinky? 

I dunno.

Cafe OTO February 1, 2016

Photo by Dawid Laskowski