News
NEWS
The London Jazz Composers Orchestra
will perform Barry Guy's composition DOUBLE TROUBLE III in Jazz Fest Berlin on Saturday 1. November
Piano soloists are Marilyn Crispell and Angelica Sanchez
for more details please go to : www.berlinerfestspiele.de/jazzfest-berlin
The legendary London Jazz Composers Orchestra has been at the forefront of improvised music for 55 years. The group features top European musicians from both the jazz and classical field. Highly acclaimed in North America and Europe, the pioneering orchestra is a Who's Who of virtuoso improvising musicians, exploring the relationship and tension between composed and improvised music and between new music and jazz. Director Barry Guy's compositions provide a structure for the musicians' explosive solo and collective improvisations.
our latest CD is :
MCD2501 HARMOS - KRAKÓW by Barry Guy
with the
London Jazz Composers Orchestra
official release date 4. July
Barry Guy bass director
Agustí Fernández piano
Michael Niesemann alto sax
Torben Snekkestad tenor & soprano saxes
Jürg Wickihalder alto sax
Simon Picard tenor sax
Julius Gabriel baritone sax
Konrad Bauer trombone
Andreas Tschopp trombone
Alan Tomlinson trombone
Henry Lowther trumpet
Martin Eberle trumpet
Rich Laughlin trumpet
Marc Unternährer tuba
Phil Wachsmann violin
Bruno Chevillon bass
Lucas Niggli drums, percussion
this CD is a re-release from the 6-CD box set published in 2022 on the NOTTWO label (MW1027-2)
from the liner notes by John Sharpe :
Fifty years and counting. In March 2020 one of the most important large groups in European jazz, The London Jazz Composers Orchestra celebrated its golden anniversary over three days in Krakow which culminated in the triumphant performance of "Harmos" heard here. Long a staple of the LJCO repertoire, with its beautiful central tune, it's one of leader Barry Guy's most approachable works. This rendition was powerful and moving, studded throughout with absolute dynamite individual contributions, and furnished a fitting conclusion to a fabulous event. ........
.......It was an incredibly stirring and moving experience which well merited the consequent prolonged standing ovation. In his notes to the 1989 edition of "Harmos", Guy finished by saying "For this one I aimed for the soul!" He assuredly hit his target.
OTHER RECENT RELEASES ON MAYA RECORDINGS :
Double LP "BARRY GUY PLAYS" MLP2401
Essay (1975) Luca Lombardi
Ausdrücke - Rondo for a Clown (1978) Hubert Stuppner
Theraps (1976) Iannis Xenakis
Memo I (1971) Bernard Rands
Voicings (1977) John Anthony Celona
Anaklasis (2002) Barry Guy
The bass music you will hear on this album is, it might be said, a child of the seventies. A ferociously radical time in the development of the double bass as a solo instrument found composers eager to formulate soundscapes that would send our Bottesinis and Dragonettis running for the exit !
As an emerging bassist in these heady times, immersed deeply into the art of improvisation where almost on a daily basis colleagues pushed the boundaries of instrumental possibilities, I found myself additionally being drawn into the world of composed music, researching novel sonorities and extended techniques. Somehow the two disciplines (in those days they were mutually suspicious of each other) seemed to coalesce around a large wooden box with strings attached. The double bass was everything you wanted it to be !
In my studio, various archive recordings from the seventies of dubious sound quality have silently collected dust (and years) in various boxes, and a recent tidying of these surviving articles prompted a little retrospective listening. This revealed a rather exciting slice of double bass history which I thought might be of interest, but a genius was needed to bring these various recordings into a sound frame that would make sense. Ferran Conangla (Barcelona) is the genius that brought all this together - a sound engineer who I have recorded with many times, and a man who knows how to deliver a vibrant sound picture of the double bass.
Barry Guy
MCD2402 Kouartéto
with
Savina Yannatou - voice
Floros Floridis - clarinet, bass clarinet
Barry Guy - bass
Ramón López - drums and tabla
We recorded this CD in May 2023 on the magical Greek island of Hydra in the Old Carpet Factory Studio. The title Kouartéto emanates from the cover image by the artist William Pownall who in the true spirit of Hydra has for many years been an important focus for visitors seeking original artistic creations. And so, in this spirit. The music on this CD reflects a multifaceted response to a multicultural and open understanding of how artists can work together.
From the liner notes by Marc Medwin:
Every project involving these four creative spirits, here residing under the umbrella-appellation “The Hydra Quartet,” is a gathering of fluidities, magical continua fixed in time even in passing. Barry Guy and Ramón López share documented histories similar to those of Savina Yannatou and Floros Floridis, performing and recording in duos brimming with the possibilities of seismic transcendence.
Like the dream images of the lullabies or the place names and boundary demarcations altering with the political tides, the music transports itself and its auditioners through and beyond cultural and chronological divides, building dunes and castles of those shifting sands we so often believe, not without reason, to comprise solid ground. The final piece captures the music’s entire emotive range, from Yannatou’s heartbreaking cries, then descending toward the fluty vibrato with which Floridis leads the whispered pitches, so reminiscent of the concluding moments of Beethoven’s final piano sonata, simply, gently but ineluctably toward silence.
This CD has recently been released on ECM
Jordina Millà - Barry Guy LIVE IN MUNICH
www.ecmrecords.com/product/live-in-munich-jordina-milla-barry-guy/
Jordina Millà: piano; Barry Guy: double bass
This live recording, from Munich’s Schwere Reiter hall, documents the debut concert performance by the duo of Catalan pianist Jordina Millà and British bassist Barry Guy. Together they shape fluid, highly detailed music, of ever changing mood, and cast fresh light on the meaning and possibilities of “extended technique” in free improvisation.
ROUGH by Barry Guy
We are pleased to release this link to the recording of Barry Guy's composition "Rough"
based on Samuel Beckett's "Rough for Radio I" with the great Swiss Ensemble Camerata Variabile
together with the amazing American Soprano Katherine Dain.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rApHXRXOtzw
BLUE SHROUD BAND in Krakow 19. - 24. November 2024
The residency in Krakow to celebrate 10 years of the BLUE SHROUD BAND
and the appearance of the ADAM quartet performing Barry Guy's string quartet
"what is the word" was all we had hoped for !
please read the report by John Sharpe :
www.allaboutjazz.com/barry-guys-blue-shroud-band-ten-year-anniversary-barry-guy
MCD2401 LIVE AT JAZZDOR with Angelica Sanchez, Barry Guy and Ramon Lopez
www.mayarecordings.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-jazzdor
available also from info@maya-recordings.com
LIMITED EDITION of STATEMENTS V-XI , BARRY GUY, solo bass
this special limited edition of Barry Guy's first solo LP is now getting very rare, and there are only
10 copies for sale with original art work by either Barry Guy himself or by the following artists:
Vanche (Belgium) - Hans Husel (Germany) - Jan Erik Willgohs (Norway) - Paul Mosse (Ireland)
Price enquiries and orders : please contact Mats Gustafsson - mats@matsgus.com
Barry Guy, featured in Duncan Heining's latest book
The limited edition hardback version of Duncan Heining’s brilliant book ‘And Did Those Feet… Six British Jazz Composers’ has sold out!
BUT, it’s now available WORLDWIDE in a paperback edition via Amazon’s ‘print on demand’ service.
www.jazzinbritain1.bandcamp.com/merch/and-did-those-feet-six-british-jazz-composers-by-duncan-heining
other news:
Barry Guy's short composition WAITING written for the Calmus Ensemble relates directly to "all this this here" for the Blue Shroud Band, since it is based on Barra Ó Seaghdha’s beautiful poem "Waiting" which forms the second part of the big band composition.
Listen to it here :
www.youtube.com/watch?v=14Z1yPieASo&list=PLCUOrDr0MbX3Hy3NLmXeqUk0zqDgry4wv&index=10
ALL THIS THIS HERE
The recording with the BLUE SHROUD BAND of Barry Guy's composition "all this this here" is available from :
www.sluchaj.bandcamp.com/album/all-this-this-here-2
from the liner notes by Barry Guy :
The title of this new work for the Blue Shroud Band comes from Samuel Beckett’s “what is the word“, his last poem and an elegiac meditation on language.
Additionally to “what is the word”, I have also used one of Beckett’s late poems “Brief Dream” which refers to the theme of transiting life and the acceptance of ending - “go end there / one fine day” and Barra Ó Seaghdha’s (Irish writer and poet) evocative poem “Waiting” .
Two 18th century Edo Haiku complete the texts featured in this piece that collectively focus on life in transit.
you can also order this CD directly from us by writing to info@maya-recordings.com
Two BLUE SHROUD films are now easy to see on-line:
THE DOCUMENTARY FILM by Jonathan Creasy from 2019.
www.theblueshroud.com/feature
please click on the Picasso painting and insert the password Guernica321
and
THE LIVE CONCERT from our performance in the Purcell Room London during the London Jazz Festival November 2019
www.theblueshroud.com/concert
MAGICAL MOBILES
by Barry Guy for bass clarinet and violin
We just received this U tube Link to a very nice live recording of
this composition from February 2020.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyflOxELlkg
The LJCO Box set with 6 CDs released by Marek Winiarski on his NOTTWO Label
Not Two Records MW-2 1027-2
has been honoured with the « German Record Critics’ Award »
as a recording of exceptional artistry and selected as one of the
« Quarterly Best » of New Releases for the First Quarter 2023
Homburger / Guy Duo with Lucas Niggli , percussion
ACANTHIS MCD2201
Maya Homburger - violin, Barry Guy - bass, Lucas Niggli - percussion
with compositions by György Kurtág , Barry Guy and Lucas Niggli
On this recording we have elected to offer a programme that is concurrent with our present times but we still want to promote the idea of “musical stretching”. No baroque music (this still happens though in our duo recitals) but a chance to hear some of the exquisite music by the iconic Hungarian composer György Kurtág, who cites J.S. Bach as one of his favourite composers. Observe for instance Kurtág’s “Hommage à J.S.B.” which is spiritually related to the Double of Bach’s d minor Allemande BWV1004. We also have been privileged to receive a piece arranged by György Kurtág for our duo - “Hommage à Eberhard Feltz” based upon Samuel Beckett’s poem “Roundelay”.
Lucas Niggli joined us to create colourful and original improvisations with an uncanny knack of playing the right sound at precisely the moment where the written music invited an intervention. So, in “Celebration” and “Rondo for Nine Birds” (inspired by a beautiful drawing by the English artist Fred Hellier) Lucas had full reign to improvise imaginative counterpoints. In “Andeutende Dynamik” (my composition based on a triptych by the Hungarian artist András Wolsky) he plays with us on the through - composed score which included improvised moments inspired by the paintings.
The recording duties were taken care of by Adrian Hart, a violinist himself who fully understood and participated in the structuring of the soundscape which supports the varied music that this album offers.
We hope that this magical mystery tour continues to stretch the musical imagination. Barry Guy
Diese neue CD auf unserem Maya Recordings Label präsentiert für einmal nicht eine Mischung von «old and new» sondern Neue Musik von György Kurtág und Barry Guy. Mit unserem langjährigen Freund und musikalischen Partner Lucas Niggli entstehen sowohl freie Improvisationen als auch Klangwelten die Barry in «Andeutende Dynamik» speziell für unser Trio kreiert hat. Dieses Werk ist inspiriert vom Triptychon des ungarischen Künstlers András Wolsky und die Idee zu «Rondo for Nine Birds» verdanken wir Fred Hellier’s (London ) Zeichnung «nine birds».
For mail orders please visit our website : www.mayarecordings.com/buy_cds
Or send us an e mail on maya@aglais.ch
If you prefer a digital version of this new CD, please visit : www.mayarecordings.bandcamp.com
TWO BOX Sets with 5 and 6 CDs have been released by Marek Winiarski on his NOTTWO Label
On these recordings you will find an amazing series of concerts from the "Barry Guy and Friends Residency" in November 2018
including on CD Number 5 the première of Barry's composition "for to end yet again".
And also the complete set of recordings from the London Jazz Composers Orchestra 50th anniversary celebration days in March 2020. On CD Number 6 there is a stunning performance of Harmos-Krakow which alone is worth buying the whole set !
www.nottwo.com/mw1031
and
www.nottwo.com/mw1027
"FLYWAYS"
Barry Guy's composition for the ensemble CAMERATA VARIABILE who commissioned him to create a piece for Mezzo Soprano, Piano and String Quartet, was premièred on 9. March in the "Kirche St. Peter" , Zürich. This occasion was filmed and recorded live.
www.vimeo.com/768431819
The wish of the ensemble was, that the piece might relate to bird migration.
A small excerpt from the text created for this composition by our Irish poet friend Barra Ó Seaghdha :
If they had remained
If they had remained on the ground
If they had remained
If they had not risen
If the birds had not risen
If that bird-mass had not abruptly risen
If their unruly upward burst had not so quickly resolved into a fluent order, before us and beyond us
If…
How would we have felt the silence before they rose?
How would we have known?
Was there silence before they rose?
Now we hear the silence before they rose.
We tell ourselves there was silence before they rose.
There was silence
from Barry's programme note:
Barra’s many facetted expressions on the subject suggested musical resolutions that slip and slide according to the tensions offered in his text. My task has been therefore to combine all of his thoughts into a rational tapestry of sounds that allow us to fly with the birds, so to speak.
Nice new photo gallery of Barry Guy on the following website :
www.tomajazz.com/web/?p=51537
