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Mark Wastell / Tansy Spinks / Gus Garside / Adrian Southby

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Wednesday July 23rd 2025
7.00pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

Buy tickets with WeGotTickets

Mark Wastell is a versatile improvising musician who has played a central role in the British improvised music scene for over a quarter of a century. He has performed and recorded extensively and his varied resume includes projects with Derek Bailey, Phil Durrant, John Butcher, Evan Parker, John Zorn, David Toop, Stewart Lee, Maggie Nicols, Thurston Moore and David Sylvian among many others.

Tansy Spinks is an artist, sound artist, and performer. She has been a regular member of The London Improvisers Orchestra, the weekly London Improvisation Workshop (with Eddie Prevost) and has performed in many alternative venues such as Café Oto, Iklectik, Hundred Years Gallery and many more, playing alongside many notable performers of live improvisation, on violin, objects and with voice.

Gus Garside is a double bassist mainly concentrating on improvised music, free jazz and contemporary music. He plays in several different groups including his longstanding string trio Arc. He has worked on three highly acclaimed albums as part of the Ron Caines/Martin Archer Axis, and has created structured improvisations for performance in the UK and Canada featuring leading players in both countries and is on a new collaboration with dancer Mim King. He is also founding member of the Brighton Safehouse collective.

Adrian Southby plays in the prepared electric guitar duo Simian Carbuncle with Matt Clark, a duo with Daniel Spicer – Fettucini Spicer – and is a long-standing improvisor at Safehouse. He has also released numerous solo albums, including the recent The Parasitologists’ Songbook, a musical homage to parasitic creatures. He plays with The Golgis, and leads the avant prog jazz metal power trio Dragons of Disgust.

+ Wildcard Quartet

+ DJ Fiery Biscuits

 

Jessica Ackerley / Eli Wallace / Rachel Musson / Mark Sanders // Annie Kerr / Andrew Greaves

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Wednesday September 10th 2025
7.00pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

Buy tickets with WeGotTickets

Jessica Ackerley is a Canadian guitarist, improviser and composer based in Honolulu and New York City and has been described as “one of the most exciting guitarists to have emerged from the US free music scene in recent years” by Wire Magazine. Since 2017, Ackerley has released 19 albums to much critical acclaim with features in Wire Magazine, Pitchfork, BBC Radio, and Bandcamp.

Eli Wallace is a pianist, improviser, and composer who resides in Brooklyn, NY, leading his own projects, and collaborating with other like-minded artists. His work as a pianist displays a proclivity to free improvisation, incorporating elaborate piano preparations that John Lewis (The Guardian) says is “…pushing the boundaries of the prepared piano.”

Mark Sanders has worked with a host of renowned musicians including Derek Bailey, Henry Grimes, Mathew Shipp, Evan Parker, Roswell Rudd, in duo and quartets with Wadada Leo Smith and trios with Charles Gayle with Sirone and William Parker.

“ubiquitous, diverse and constantly creative, drummer Mark Sanders always outdoes himself, whether playing with restraint or erupting like a dynamo.” Bruce L Gallenter, Downtown Music Gallery. NY

Rachel Musson is a saxophonist, improviser and composer living in London, UK. She is involved with a variety of improvisation projects, and works regularly with Mark Sanders, Pat Thomas, Hannah Marshall, Julie Kjaer, Corey Mwamba, Olie Brice, Alex Ward, Alex Hawkins amongst others.

“A free-improviser sensitive to melody-like narrative and dramatic pacing” – John Fordham, The Guardian

Plus support from:

Annie Kerr (violin) and Andrew Greaves (synth)

Debut gig from a new duo formed by two longstanding Safehouse members.

+ Wildcard Quartet

+ DJ Fiery Biscuits

Charlotte Keeffe’s Right Here, Right Now Quartet // Larker

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Wednesday October 22nd 2025
7.00pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

Buy tickets with WeGotTickets

Charlotte Keeffe – Sound Brush / trumpet, flugelhorn and compositions
Ashley John Long – double bass
Ben Handysides – drums
Moss Freed – guitar

With her Right Here, Right Now Quartet Charlotte Keeffe enables raw musical ingredients and individual expressions to come together and flow. She is captivated by trumpeters like Jaimie Branch, Peter Evans, Tomasz Stańko, Nate Wooley and Lester Bowie, and inspired by abstract painters – referring to her horns as ‘Sound Brushes’.

“The radical spirit of offhand precarity which radiates throughout this session frequently bubbles over into an effervescent sense of the imperative to explore. In a word? Fearless.” – PRESTO MUSIC

“A messy emporium of raw, raucous realness. Alive.  Keeffe and her quartet nailed it.” – Sammy Stein, FREE JAZZ BLOG

“Charlotte Keeffe is rapidly developing a reputation as one of UK’s finest improvisers” – Tony Dudley-Evans

Charlotte vividly describes the quartet as “a breeding ground for squelchy, sploshy, splashy sound-brush playing …Overtly over-blowing, splitting, splattering, squirming, squeaking and squealing out ALIVE! Howling and hooting, chomping and chaffing… Dusty, distorted, flimsy, fragile, manic, ghostly, guttural sound strokes rip through whirlwinds and whirlpools of wholesome gooey-sound-dough! A turbulent tease, staggering, swaying, abruptly plunging into intentional vagueness… A messy emporium of raw, raucous realness. Alive. Right Here, Right Now. It is as it is…”

Larker

Matt Clark is an improvising guitarist and composer from Brighton, drawing on free jazz, avant-garde, experimental and electronic music. He is currently working with MC3, a London-based improvising trio with Charlotte Keeffe and James Edmunds – the trio engages in musical conversations and sonic exploration; interweaving dialogues between three distinctive voices: guitar, trumpet and drums; and with Simian Carbuncle, a guitar duo exploring the sonic possibilities of unorthodox techniques, with regular collaborator Ade Southby.

Annie Kerr draws on a wide range of influences to create improvised soundworlds using violin, piano and text in performance, session work and studio collaborations with dancers, artists, actors and filmmakers. She plays in regular and ad hoc combos with musicians in Brighton and London.

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Ken Vandermark + Paal Nilssen-Love // Neil Metcalfe + Barry Edwards + Colin Somervell

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Wednesday November 19th 2025
7.30pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
@ TheFolklore Rooms, The Quadrant, 12 North St, Brighton

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Ken Vandermark + Paal Nilssen-Love

The high impact duo of Paal Nilssen-Love (drums) and Ken Vandermark (reeds) has been working together at an accelerated rate since 2002, and they have put out seven albums of exceptional and wide ranging improvised music since then. Though they have both worked in many critically acclaimed groups- from the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, Lean Left (with Terrie Hessels and Andy Moor of The Ex) to Double Tandem (with Dutch saxophonist, Ab Baars)- they have continued to return to their duo for more than a dozen years because it remains crucial to their creative output.

“one of the most powerful improvisational duos around” – Derek Stone, freejazzblog.

 

Neil Metcalfe + Barry Edwards + Colin Somervell

Formed in 2024 and having performed and recorded regularly since then, this trio combines lyricism and textural improvisation in a chamber-like setting. Flautist Neil Metcalfe is an esteemed veteran of the improv scene since the 1970s while Barry Edwards (electric guitar) and Colin Somervell (double bass) have been collaborating together since the early 2000s.

 

+ Wildcard Quartet
+ DJ Mystery Lesson

Hill Collective

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Thursday December 18th 2025
7pm
£9 / £6 members + concs
@ The Rose Hill

Hill Collective have garnered a reputation as one of the most exciting jazz ensembles in Brighton, combining tight playing and swinging compositions with a willingness to embrace chance and improvisation that takes them to places few others dare to go to!
A high-spirited final Safehouse gig of the year – come and celebrate the Saturnalian period with us, with maybe a few tunes from Saturn thrown in… !

+ support TBA soon
+ Wildcard Quartet
+ DJ Fiery Biscuits