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Black Top’s Pat Thomas in the summer of June 2011 began a series of solo improvisations in the City University Music Studios and set to work on a solo piano album now released under the title Al-Khwarizmi Variations. The album builds its own unique soundscape via the arc of 10 elaborately realised variations anyone who’s heard Black Top, which sees Thomas often joined by Steve Williamson or Orphy Robinson, will be familiar with. It’s released on the Fataka label, home to John Coxon, Evan Parker and Eddie Prévost’s album Cinema, and John Butcher/Matthew Shipp’s At Oto. Muḥammad Al-Khwarizmi was an eighth century Baghdad-born mathematician whose works introduced Hindu-Arabic numerals and algebraic ideas into Western mathematics.
The cover of Al-Khwarizmi Variations, above. Pat Thomas plays Leftitude in London on Wednesday: www.leftitudefestival.com