Rachel Musson is a saxophonist, improviser and composer living in London, UK. She is involved with a variety of improvisation projects, including a trio with Hannah Marshall and Julie Kjaer, a duo with bassist Olie Brice, and a trio with Mark Sanders and John Edwards who have released a recent album Bibimbap on Two Rivers Records.

Rachel also features on a trio album released this year with Pat Thomas and Mark Sanders, and a quartet album with William Parker, Daniel Carter and Federico Ughi. She plays regularly on the London and International improvised music and free jazz scene.

Olie Brice is a double bassist who may well be familiar to Safehouse regulars, having appeared previously with John Butcher, Luis Vicente and Mark Sanders to name a few. He leads two bands – a quintet that plays his original compositions and a freely improvising trio featuring Tobias Delius and Mark Sanders. He has also worked with musicians including Paul Dunmall, Tony Malaby, Steve Swell, Achim Kaufmann, Alex Ward and Ingrid Laubrock.

“Brice makes the entire body of his bass sing. He has the ability to deliver a fractal line that is as purposeful as any by the great jazz bassists, but to do so within an entirely abstract setting” – Brian Morton, Point of Departure

Incus, Malleus and Stapes

Improv trio utilising some aleatoric methods:

Alan Jackson— plays the “Electric Bullroarer” – part homemade electronics, part modular synthesizer, it is a kit of parts for exploring feedback and resonance. It uses pressure, tilt, motion, microphones and string to control its sound, usually shaping some kind of feedback process.

Marc Muir likes to use his mouth to explore the more disconcerting facets of his mind.

Simon Mclennan uses guitar and electronics to explore harmony and resonance.

Wildcard Quartet

Tickets: https://www.wegottickets.com/event/492492

Ivo Perelman

Born in 1961 in São Paulo, Brazil, Perelman was a classical guitar prodigy who tried his hand at many other instruments – including cello, clarinet, and trombone – before gravitating to the tenor saxophone. His initial heroes were the cool jazz saxophonists Stan Getz and Paul Desmond. But although these artists’ romantic bent still shapes Perelman’s voluptuous improvisations, it would be hard to find their direct influence in the fiery, galvanic, iconoclastic solos that have become his trademark.

“Perelman is one of the great saxophone virtuosi and exponents of spontaneous composition to have emerged in the past three decades.” –Jazzwise

“Sax extraordinaire Ivo Perelman is one of the most advanced living practitioners of the tenor saxophone…the Brazilian-born sax master’s ability to create out of thin air has few if any peers.” – Something Else

Phil Minton

For most of the last forty years, Minton has been working as an improvising vocalist. Numerous composers have written music especially for his extended vocal techniques. He has a quartet with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner and John Butcher, and ongoing duos, trios and quartets with above and many other musicians.

Since the 80s, his Feral Choir, in which he voice-conducts workshops and concerts, has performed in over twenty countries.

“Phil Minton is best known for his startling vocal improvisations. On his new solo CD, this sensible looking man proffers 37 thin slices of his unfettered soul. Not long ago these croaks, burps, high-pitched exhalations, deep-throated drones and shreds of garbled half-language would have seen Minton either burnt or hailed as an emissary of God.” – Stewart Lee, The Sunday Times

Jean Michel Van Schouwburg is an improvising singer from Belgium. He is well versed in all sorts of vocalising: throat singing, overtones, yodels, mouth sounds, falsettos, multiphonics, invented languages to name a few.

Here he is in Peter Strickland’s 2012 movie Berberian Sound Studio, playing himself playing a goblin:

Jonathan Higgins

Jonathan Higgins is a sound artist and performer based in London who focuses on finding different ways of utilising noise to create music. Frustrated with the limitations of conventional digital DJ equipment Jonathan modified CD players to uncover a world of noise usually hidden within the circuitry. For the past year he has been performing ‘glitch turntablism’ with a setup of three hacked Sony Discman players and a cheap DJ mixer.

Wildcard Quartet

https://www.wegottickets.com/event/493105

Trevor Watts

Since the 1960s Trevor Watts has been at the forefront of many innovations as a saxophone player, percussionist and composer. He is the only founder member of The Spontaneous Music Ensemble still left – other founder members were John Stevens & Paul Rutherford, and later members included Kenny Wheeler, Dave Holland, Evan Parker and Derek Bailey. His Amalgam group began in 1967 with bassist Barry Guy and trombonist Paul Rutherford, and he was a founder member of Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers Orchestra. He was the instigator behind the Moire Music Group and The Drum Orchestra, which involved musicians from North and South Africa and Latin America. He has played with many great US jazz musicians, including Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, Steve Lacy, Kent Carter, Rashied Ali, Steve Swallow and Bobby Bradford.

http://www.trevorwatts.co.uk
https://soundcloud.com/moire-watts

Jamie Harris

Between 2003 and 2007 Jamie played in an acclaimed duo with Trevor Watts and was also during this time involved in a trio with Watts and the Mexican percussionist and inventor of the Urukungolo Gibran Cervantes. The Watts/Harris duo performed widely (USA, Dominican Rep, Brazil, Mongolia, Highlands and Islands of Scotland), and there are three CD releases from this period to date.

In 2019 the Watts/Harris duo return with a new set of rhythmical charged composition .

Plus playing for the first time as a quartet…..

Ron Caines: saxophones
Alice Eldridge: cello
Gus Garside: double bass
James Parsons: drums

Ron Caines was, in the late 1960s, a founder member of pioneering UK Prog-psych group East of Eden, and has been a key member of improvising collectives in both Bristol and Brighton.

Alice Eldridge is a cellist and researcher working across sound, technology and ecology in scientific and creative domains.   She is 1/4 of all female multi-arts collective, Collectress, 1/2 of Feedback Cell, an ongoing experiment in open-ended hybrid luthiary and a regular at John Russell’s Fete Quaqua and Brighton’s Safehouse.

Gus Garside has been active as a musician since the 1970s. He is a mainstay of Safehouse, and is a member of the long-running string trio, Arc, with Sylvia Hallett and Danny Kingshill and of the electro-acoustic duo, Static Memories.

James Parsons drums with In Threads, God’s Teeth And The Interstellar Tropics and Bare Springs among others, and is also known as a dab hand in the comics department.

Plus

Wildcard Quartet

Rachel Cohen: voice / performance
Monty Oxymoron: piano
Sue Craske: percussion
Al Strachan: cornet

16th October 2021
8pm
£7 / £5 members

The Dinner Party Trio with special guest Stefano Luigi Mangia (voice) is a collective free improvising trio comprised of Anglo-Russian pianist Vladimir Miller (Moscow Composers Orchestra), Italian double-bassist Pierpaolo Martino – a founding member of avant-jazz ensembles Mondegreen and Machine3 – and British saxophonist Adrian Northover known for The Remote Viewers and London Improvisers Orchestra.

Plus performances by Simon Mclennan (guitar) and Alice Eldridge (cello).

Wednesday 17th November 2021
8pm
£3 / £2 members

This will be at the Rose Hill. Usually we have open sessions on the first Wednesday of the month, but due to w previous booking at Rose Hill this is on the third Weds of the month!

November 25th 2021
8pm doors
£7 advance
@ The Rose Hill

Eternal Triangle

Trevor Watts / alto, soprano, composer
Veryan Weston / piano, synth
Jamie Harris / congas, percussion

Eternal Triangle play the music of Trevor Watts, compositions originally inspired by rhythmic structures from Africa and South America as well as jazz and European musical forms.

The trio is built on two duos: Veryan and Trevor first played together in Trevor’s ‘Moiré Music’ in the early 1980s and since then have had a long collaboration in the ‘Dialogues’ project where their work as open improvisers was explored together for many years worldwide. The second duo consists of Jamie and Trevor where Jamie was involved in Trevor’s ‘Celebration Band’ in the 2000s and later in a very successful duo touring worldwide and recording several CDs. The third duo with Veryan and Jamie is yet to be explored!

In July 2021 the three musicians began working together on some beautiful new pieces specifically conceived by Trevor. The development of these compositions, for instance, can happen during rehearsals or during a concert. Any player in the group can discover something new within each piece, and therefore the compositions are ever changing. The strengths of this trio are like the durable and inert strength of a triangle, where each side supports the other – ‘Eternal Triangle’. This is a music with a depth that is both expansive and honest.

TREVOR WATTS

A founder member of The Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Trevor also founded Amalgam (which included Keith Rowe) and his 1980s Moire Music Group which included Veryan Weston & Peter Knight as well as Phil Minton/Pinise Saul/Lol Coxhill many more and The Drum Orchestra (1980-1997), which involved musicians mainly from Ghana (ECM 1449 CD “A Wider Embrace”). He instigated the 35 piece collaboration with the Drum Orchestra and Teatro Negro de Barlovento (Venezuela) which toured here and also in Venezuela in the 1990’s and around the World on every continent. Other prominent musicians he’s played with include Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, Steve Lacy, Kent Carter, Rashied Ali, Steve Swallow, Bobby Bradford, Cyro Baptista and Stan Tracey.

Website: http://www.trevorwatts.co.uk / https://soundcloud.com/moire-watts

VERYAN WESTON

Veryan Weston (born 1950) was awarded ‘Young Jazz Musician of 1979’ by GLAA. In the ’80s, Veryan worked internationally with Lol Coxhill (with whom he made his first recordings – Ogun 525 and Random Radar), the Eddie Prévost Quartet. At this time, he also first met Trevor working in his band Moiré Music which used a unique combination of African rhythmic structures with the European musical tradition (Arc 02).

In the ’90s, collaborations with Phil Minton whom he met through Trevor’s Moiré Music included the Ways duos, Songs from a Prison Diary awarded the Cornelius Cardew composition prize, a quartet performing extracts from Joyce’s Finnegans wake (with Phil, John Butcher and Roger Turner), and 4Walls with Luc Ex and Michael Vatcher. And most recently – Ways for an Orchestra commissioned by the Angelica Festival (Bologna, Italy – 2017)

http://veryanweston.weebly.com/

JAMIE HARRIS

Jamie attended the Jazz diploma course in Chichester as a singer, which was were he met the saxophonist Marcus Cummins who introduced him to the music of Trevor Watts. In 1999 Harris was given the opportunity to organise a music group made up of young musicians for a concert to be musically directed by Watts. This group continued to rehearse after said concert and it was during this first rehearsal with out a drummer in attendance that Watts handed Harris a drum and asked him to bang it. The group eventually became “Trevor Watts and the Celebration Band”, where Harris served as percussionist. The Celebration Band toured USA / Canada as well as playing several concerts in the UK and Europe. In 2003 Watts and Harris began performing as a duo, taking this project to Mongolia, USA/Canada, Mexico, The Dominican Republic and Brazil among other locations.

Hearn Brice Fell

Geoff Hearn:  tenor and soprano sax
Olie Brice: double bass
Milo Fell: drums / percussion

A new free improvisation trio led by Safehouse co-founder Geoff Hearn!

1st December 2021
8pm
£3 / £2 members

This will be at the Rose Hill.

5th January 2022
8pm
£3 / £2 members

This will be at the Rose Hill.

January 26th 2022
8pm doors
£7 / £5 members
@ The Rose Hill

A new quartet of Matt Clark (Matt Clark Three, Caaw) on guitar, Charlotte Keeffe (Charlotte Keeffe Quartet, the London Improvisers Orchestra, Andrew Woodhead’s Pendulums) on trumpet, Ozzy Moysey (Ancient Infinity Orchestra) on double bass and James Edmunds (Daisy Chute, Tara Lily) on drums.

Their new album is called ‘Music In Unusual Spaces’, and it documents the strange feeling of coming out of lockdown, of spaces opening up, a record of the city waking up…

“The overall effect creates a dynamic sonic quality, as if a laid-back street-level musical trio were performing their own structured and improvised material but also incorporating the ephemeral swell of sounds around them…”
Jordan Penney – AllAboutJazz.com

Plus …

Yellow Door

Ruben Aaronovitch Bruce: saxophone
Luke Woolfenden: bass
Molly O’hara: vocals
Ned Peckham: drums

Exploratory rock improvisations.

Plus…

The Wildcard Quartet

Adrian Southby: guitar / wind instruments
Rachel Cohen: voice / movement
Al Strachan: cornet / electronics
Marc Muir: voice

2nd February 2022
8pm
£3 / £2 members

This will be at the Rose Hill.

2nd March 2022
8pm
£3 / £2 members

This will be at the Rose Hill.

23 March 2022
8pm doors
£7 / £5 members
@ The Rose Hill

Alex Ward

We’re very happy to welcome back composer, improviser, performer and creative polymath, Alex Ward. Predominantly a guitar and clarinet player, Ward is regarded as one of the most technically accomplished performers of both free and composed music.  He has played recently as part of Pere Ubu,  and before the pandemic struck he played shows in the UK and US as part of the phenomenal This is Not This Heat.

Having had his debut record put out on Derek Bailey’s Incus label in 1990, Ward has continued to play at an astonishing level ever since. His work ranges from his formidably knotty guitar playing in avant-rock two piece Dead Days Beyond Help to his compositions-for-improvisers including Forebrace and the Alex Ward Quintet/Sextet.

His latest solo album Gated was released on Martin Archer’s Discus label – take a listen to it here:

6th April 2022
7.30pm
£3 / £2 members

Note we are starting earlier now – 7.30pm doors for an 8pm start of music!

Wednesday April 20th 2022
8pm doors
£7 / £5 members
@ The Rose Hill

Plus 

Plus:

Mutter

Adrian Southby – baritone electric guitar
Marc Muir – voice
Gus Garside – double bass

The Wildcard Quartet

Penny Howe – violin
Phil Smith – trumpet
Z*qhygoem – dulcimer
Matt Clark – guitar