Angharad Davies, Benedict Drew, John Edwards, Tom Chant (quartet)

Event information

A night of musical improvisation from performers Angharad Davies, Benedict Drew, John Edwards, and Tom Chant.

Angharad Davies is a Welsh violinist based in London working with free-improvisation, compositions and performance. Her approach to sound involves attentive listening and exploring beyond the sonic confines of her instrument, her classical training and performance expectation. Much of her work involves collaboration. She has long standing duos with Tisha Mukarji, Dominic Lash and Lina Lapelyte and plays with Common Objects, Cranc and Skogen. She has been involved in projects with Tarek Atoui, Tony Conrad, Richard Dawson, Gwenno, Roberta Jean, Jack McNamara, Rie Nakajima, Tim Parkinson, Eliane Radigue, Georgia Ruth and J.G.Thirlwell. Most of her records are released on Another Timbre but she also has releases on Absinth Records, allthatdust, Confrontrecords, Emanem, Potlatch, NI VU Ni CONNU and winds measure recordings. Her first orchestral piece was commissioned by LCMF in 2019 : I ble'r aeth y gwrachod i gyd....?/ Where did all the witches go...? She has since been commissioned by Explore Ensemble: Sitting with Emptiness (2022); GBSR duo: Empty Spaces II (2023) and will be making new pieces for andPlay, Dominic Lash and Heather Roche in 2025.

Tom Chant (b. Dublin 1975) is a saxophonist and composer from London living in Barcelona. Tom focuses mainly on free improvised music which he has been involved in for 30 years. In the mid 90’s Tom started attending Maggie Nicols’ Gathering sessions and continued for many years with Maggie giving Tom his first concert. He has worked with Eddie Prévost and John Edwards since 1997 and with them has recorded four records and toured festivals around the world. He has recorded with the London Improvisers Orchestra, Otomo Yoshihide, Angharad Davies, Sharif Sehnoui, Lê Quan Ninh, Susana Santos Silva, Ferran Fages and many others, while playing concerts with a host of well known and not so well known musicians. Tom’s current practice concerns the entropy of technique and the spaces that this leaves for new vocabularies and dialogues.

Benedict Drew, (b. Kyneton, Australia) lives and works in Whitstable and Margate, UK. Drew works across video, sculpture, drawing, painting, and music. He creates large-scale installations, often concerned with ecstatic responses to socio-political anxiety. Since the 1990s Benedict Drew has performed in improvising ensembles, programmed concerts and club nights, and was a producer at the cultural charity London Musicians Collective. Drew has released several records on labels including Mana Records and Kaleidoscope, and often collaborates with other artists and musicians. He launched his own label, Thanet Tape Centre, in May 2020 and regularly makes work for radio. He is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London.

John Edwards is a true virtuoso whose staggering range of techniques and boundless musical imagination have redefined the possibility of the double bass and dramatically expanded its role, whether playing solo or with others. Perpetually in demand, he has played with Evan Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Sunny Murray, Derek Bailey, Joe McPhee, Lol Coxhill, Louis Moholo, Peter Brötzmann, Mulatu Astatke and countless others.
"I think John Edwards is absolutely remarkable: there’s never been anything like him before, anywhere in jazz." - Richard Williams, The Blue Moment

Tom Chant (b. Dublin 1975) is a saxophonist and composer from London living in Barcelona. Tom focuses mainly on free improvised music which he has been involved in for 30 years. In the mid 90’s Tom started attending Maggie Nicols’ Gathering sessions and continued for many years with Maggie giving Tom his first concert. He has worked with Eddie Prévost and John Edwards since 1997 and with them has recorded four records and toured festivals around the world. He has recorded with the London Improvisers Orchestra, Otomo Yoshihide, Angharad Davies, Sharif Sehnoui, Lê Quan Ninh, Susana Santos Silva, Ferran Fages and many others, while playing concerts with a host of well known and not so well known musicians. Tom’s current practice concerns the entropy of technique and the spaces that this leaves for new vocabularies and dialogues.