★Freeform Association
Ardent
Ardent is an unusual album. It's unusual because in these parts - specially in Palma de Mallorca where AgustÌ Fernadez was born - it's hard to find a pianist who composes his own music; unusual also because it's not often that you get a musician deciding to record a first album after 20 years of constant professional practice. But the same circumstances that make of Ardent an unusual album make it also an extraordinary album. For those of us who've enjoyed AgustÌ Fern·ndez in concert, this album…
Fragments of parts
Roger Turner, drums. Witold Oleszak, piano. Recorded in 2012.'Both players are equally skilled in anticipating the moment at which exposed, entwined resonances will peak and yield their richest fold of textures. They can also both intuit, superbly, whether a given sound should be enhanced or, favouring momentary silence, they should cancel it out. Their closely-considered duets on this album make for a detailed, absorbing experience, every moment yielding the anticipated unexpected.'
Over The Title
Roger Turner, studio drumset and cymbals. Witold Oleszak, inner piano. Recorded in 2010.
Cuts
Tim Hodgkinson about Cuts: "These rambles concern technical aspects of the pieces on this CD. In the first piece, a solo for bass clarinet, I did not apply any mathematical thinking to the time organisation. It is one of a series of pieces in which I set out to write for wind instrument + ring-modulation, and ended up ditching the modulation and finding ways to play some equivalent on the instrument itself. Experimenting with embouchure and breath, I came up with certain harmonics which I then i…
Wishing You Were Here
OUTSTANDING!!! a set of five CDs containing a selection of the most interesting and technically the best recordings of the ensemble active from 1982 till 2010. This legendary trio - Mike Cooper, Lol Coxhill and Roger Turner - played its way through 28 years of concerts, just a few in most years, but a presence not forgotten - in part because of its willingness to tread paths uncongenial to many improvisers, in particular those theatrical, referential and genre-inflected. Lol, a colossus an…