Events

After a tour in the United States in April of 2022, festival appearances in Belgrade and Stockholm later that year, and performances in Belgium during the autumn of 2023, Paul Lytton (drums), Ken Vandermark (reeds), and Nate Wooley (trumpet), three key figures of the international experimental and improvised music scenes, will come together for a unique series of concerts in England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands during September of 2024.  Vandermark and Wooley have been working as a duo for almost a decade, touring in both the States and in Europe, and have released three critically acclaimed albums together.  Both have performed and recorded with Lytton many times, and the three of them issued an album of trio material as part of the double CD, The Nows, in 2012.  The trio’s upcoming tour in Europe will be an extremely rare chance to hear Paul Lytton perform.  His history connected to improvised music is legendary, and this collaboration with Vandermark and Wooley, two of the most significant cutting-edge musicians of their generations, will exceptional.

Paul Lytton, a central figure in the British free improvisation movement of the 1960s and 70s which included Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, and Paul Rutherford, was instrumental in reshaping the way drums and percussion were viewed in free music. He is one of a handful of percussionists from that time whose work allowed the drum kit to become even more free from the timekeeping constraints of jazz up to that point; the instrument becoming less a set of drums and more a series of membranes on which to create an atmosphere. His earliest experiments in homemade instruments and electronics with Evan Parker have spurred generations on to look outside systems with names such as "jazz" and "improv" and to explore new modes of communication in the moment.

Ken Vandermark is an avant-garde composer, improviser, saxophonist/clarinetist, curator, writer; and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in music 1999.  He moved to Chicago from Boston in 1989 and has worked continuously from the early 1990s onward, both as a performer and organizer in North America, Europe, Latin America, Japan, and Ethiopia, recording in a large array of contexts, with many internationally renowned musicians. 

Nate Wooley’s solo playing has often been cited as being a part of an international revolution in improvised trumpet and has gathered international acclaim.  Time Out New York has called him “an iconoclastic trumpeter”, and Dave Douglas has said, “Nate Wooley is one of the most interesting and unusual trumpet players living today, and that is without hyperbole”.  His collaborative work as a composer has been celebrated by critics and has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.

Welcome back Ken en Nate!