Sullow / The Greater London Banjo Trio | Hedgehog

Event information

During the early years of the 20th century there were up to 100 banjo manufacturers in Britain – most of them in London - ranging from individual craftsmen to factories employing scores of workers. By the 1990s only the devotees of the B.M.G. Federation, the 'Banjo Times' and ‘Banjo Broadsheet’, and Reading Banjo Festival kept the dying flame flickering. The old London Banjo Club, by now renamed the Westminster Banjo Circle, was also in extremis. In January 1992 the Banjo Circle began publishing their journal and decided that the way forward was to present the banjo to the public at every opportunity. To this end they commended holding regional banjo rallies. Thirty years later, The Greater London Banjo Trio was formed.

Sullow are an improvising trio of intersecting Venn membership with the Banjo Trio: Jacken Elswyth, Daniel S. Evans and Joshua Barfoot of Shovel Dance Collective. Inflected and informed by traditional music, they negotiate an improvisation that has been variably described as ‘farmyard’ and ‘rodeo’. Repeated patterns rise and fall in quick attacks, short decays and dense bursts of momentary composition.