Avant garde improvising piano trio Bourne/Davis/Kane are to premiere composer Piers Hellawell’s ‘Sound Carvings, Strange Tryst’ at the Brilliant Corners festival in March, festival promoter Moving on Music, who commissioned the piece, have confirmed.
The 29 March Belfast premiere comes in a year when the piece forms part of the first PRS for Music Foundation New Music Biennial, an initiative involving 20 new works to be performed around the country and at special weekend events at London’s Southbank Centre in early-July and in Glasgow during the Commonwealth Games in early-August.
Piers Hellawell, whose recent work has included ‘Syzygy’ for brass quintet and orchestra, premiered by Stockholm Chamber Brass in Sweden last year, has chronicled the progress of his collaboration with Bourne/Davis/Kane on a blog documenting the trials and tribulations of the writing process, commenting that Bourne/Davis/Kane “together constitute a table light: the bulb, lamp and flex/plug are inseparable and harmonized, as a working unit, but as components they otherwise remain entirely individual.”
Hellawell goes on to talk of a defining point reached as part of the process in accommodating both notated music and the Bourne/Davis/Kane improvising method where he says he “cut out more notated stuff so that it becomes the minority, handing more content to BDK as it were”. Hellawell records his surprise at what happened next. “Dave Kane has looked at my penitential version, with stuff cut out, and feels too many notes have been chopped! Heroically, he has then toiled over an edited version of my electronic score, ‘doctored’ to resemble BDK normal working materials, while retaining almost all my materials. Items have found their way into repeat boxes, and percussion notation is a big improvement on my effort – but my stuff is mostly there… I show this to Steve [Davis], who agrees that as a ‘look’ it is infinitely more straight-forward for them, as they tackle the material in limited rehearsal. The stuff is mine but, as Dave points out with infinite tact, the notation is subtly different, to look as they expect.”
Bourne/Davis/Kane first met in 2002 performing for the first time in Belfast and on their 2008 debut album Lost Something (Edition Records) John Fordham writing in The Guardian compared the trio “to some of the famous odysseys of Cecil Taylor's groups, with Bourne’s stingingly precise phrasing giving shape and clarity to even the most torrentially seamless episodes.” The trio’s next album The Money Notes, released by Tony Bevan’s Foghorn label in late-2010 also impressed reviewers and was described by Radio 3 presenter Kevin Le Gendre as possessing “real beauty in several compositions, often by way of graceful, slow-moving melodies.”
The first New Music Biennial performances by other participants in the initiative begin this month and of the range of music involved to emerge this year besides ‘Sound Carvings, Strange Tryst’ in the jazz and improvised music sphere includes Gwilym Simcock's collaboration with clarinettist Michael Collins in a work for clarinet, strings, jazz trio and speaker; Luke Styles’ new work featuring experimental vocal trio Juice and BBC New Generation artist Trish Clowes’ jazz/classical ensemble Tangent, performing alongside three dancers retelling a Native Canadian folk tale; and The Noisettes’ Shingai Shoniwa and The Invisible’s David Okumu, with a new vocal work involving community choirs.
Matthew Bourne, Steve Davis, and Dave Kane (top, left to right); and Piers Hellawell (above)