Nat Birchall Quartet • Marshall Allen & James Harrar’s Cinema Soloriens and the Cosmo-Drama [US]
Band on the Wall | 8.30pm, double bill (2x60min)
Leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra teams up with experimental film-maker and multi-instrumentalists for a cosmic journey, paired up with spiritual, modal explorations of post-Coltrane transcendental radiance.
Nat Birchall Quartet
Nat Birchall – tenor saxophone
Adam Fairhall – piano
Gavin Barras – double bass
Gaz Hughes – drums
Opening the evening, a set of spiritual, modal explorations of post-Coltrane transcendental radiance led by Manchester’s leading exponent. Performing pieces from his new release Guiding Spirit, Nat’s music digs deep: hypnotic and intense but with a lyrical simplicity that connects directly with the emotions.
Marshall Allen & James Harrar’s Cinema Soloriens and the Cosmo-Drama [US]
Marshall Allen – flute, alto saxophone, clarinet, EVI, kora, percussion
James Harrar – flute, bamboo alto saxophone, clarinet, kora, koto, percussion
Kamil Kruta – guitar, bass
Ed Wilcox – drums, harmonica, glockenspiel
Marshall Allen led the reeds section in Sun Ra’s Arkestra for over 40 years, and is now its current director. Here, he teams up with experimental film-maker and multi-instrumentalist Harrar to continue the cosmic journey that Ra, the iconic pioneering free jazz leader and musical cosmologist, began in the ‘60s. The music is passionate, haunting, eerie, complex, liberating…a curious soundworld recalling The Magic City and Strange Strings, inhabited by slowly-evolving compositions and deconstructed space chants to celebrate Ra’s legacy.
The film footage includes Harrar’s own work (meditations on beauty, perception and allegory, saints and peacocks in artful mosaics, slow-moving and processed imagery) and rare and restored footage of Sun Ra’s own early work.
Presented in association with Band on the Wall
£14 -- click for ticket information
Website (Nat Birchall)
Myspace (Cinema Soloriens)
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Hear the sound (Cinema Soloriens):
