Klaus Bru – C-melody saxophone, electronics
Phelan Burgoyne – drums
The Greater Part of the Whole album release concert
Doors 7.30 | music 8pm | £12 /£7 cash
Describing music with words, isn’t that like imprisoning clouds?
Take two things, put them together, let them react, and see what happens: is the result greater than just the added amount of the two parts? Or, take this case: Do two people together make better music than when they each play by themselves? The question was rhetorical, but the answer is a resounding yes!
A saxophone and drums duo!
It’s not that saxophone and drums duos have no history. But unlike the sheer energy of John Coltrane’s and Elvin Jones’s unmatched flights, Bru and Burgoyne often take a lyrical stance, emphasise sonic impressionism, and are at any point of their improvisations concerned with the greater part of the whole.
More rhetorical questions here: What if no other instrument is padding the space between the wood of the drum shells and the brass body of the sax? Is there anybody to measure and compare the vibrations of the reed and the alloy of the cymbals? But do you really miss a bass, a piano, a guitar, a what-not? How big is that space? What lies there? A world or a trifle, silence or a storm?
Burgoyne plays his characteristic, wide-open style of drumming, leaving plenty of space for ideas to develop and blossom, and Bru sends his C-Melody sax through effects that could have been pilfered from a lab for experimental guitar playing. The music spans Eastern European Folk music influenced explorations, soundscapes that move like clouds, and abstract musical narratives. It’s a journey, a trip, an odyssey through a sound world of its own.
Phelan Burgoyne and Klaus Bru first met late on a Sunday night at the Vortex jam session in London in 2015. When they got to play together, they realised they had much more in common than the shared feeling of awkwardness in an environment of mainstream jazz and musical testosterone. Since then, they have kept up a musical friendship which has extended to a number of great musicians, among them Rob Luft, Olie Brice, Huw Williams, Tim Fairhall. This concert marks their first release.
Klaus Bru – C-melody saxophone, electronics
German-born Klaus Bru is possibly the only internationally working saxophonist specialising in C-saxophones, namely the C-Melody Sax, and the C-Soprano Sax. These instruments had their heyday in the 1920’s but are now mostly collector’s items on internet auction sites. With a musical output spanning Free Improvisation, eclectic noise, harmonic-melodic Jazz and diverse folk music styles, Bru makes a point of playing contemporary music (see here: https://youtu.be/1L8-Hg7Z_xI), despite the fact that his instruments are deemed utterly old-fashioned (see here: https://youtu.be/Db9P-u1_2bE).
Klaus Bru lived in Munich, Graz, Vienna, Berlin, Taipei, and Beijing, and lives in London since 2014. The list of his collaborators is long, here are just a few: Marc Ribot, Sunny Murray, Anthony Coleman, Jojo Mayer, David Friesen, Jianhong Li, Daiguo Li, Yan Jun, Shih-Yang Lee, Li-Chin, Li, and more recently in London Cleveland Watkiss, Orphy Robinson, Terry Day, Beibei Wang, Pat Thomas, Kate Shortt, Mandhira de Saram, Steve Beresford, Tania Chen, Yoni Silver, Mark Sanders, David Leahy.
Phelan Burgoyne – drums
Phelan Burgoyne (1994) is a British drummer and composer based in Firenze, Italy. Born into an artistic family, he grew up playing Rock, Jazz and Classical percussion in the cultural county of Suffolk on the east coast of England. At age sixteen he moved to London where he was accepted on a full scholarship to the prestigious Purcell school for young musicians and went on to attain a first class degree from the Royal Academy of Music, London (where he studied with Martin France and Jeff Williams) and took part in the Erasmus exchange programme at the Hochschule für Musik, Basel, Switzerland (where he was taught by Jeff Ballard and Larry Grenadier).
In the years since graduating, Burgoyne has gained an international reputation touring across the U.K, Europe and beyond, releasing a plethora of critically acclaimed albums as a leader and co-leader; Unquiet Quiet (2015) and Verdasio (2019) with his trio featuring veteran British saxophonist Martin Speake and rising star guitarist Rob Luft, Introducing REBOP (2018) and Live at Veganz n’ Roses (2019) an Anglo-German quintet featuring legend Jorge Rossy on vibraphone and Downhill (2019), a free Jazz trio with Oded Geizhals and Nadav Erlich. Divertimento (2018) in duo with Italian ECM artist pianist Emanuele Maniscalco, and On Thursday (2020) in trio featuring Danish bass veteran Anders Christensen both on the Berlin based HOUT label. In 2021 Burgoyne curated and produced Yazgol – the previously unrecorded compositions of Paul Motian featuring special guests Larry Grenadier, Tal Yahalom and Nicolas Masson and released a new home recordings entitled The Grain (2021) featuring James Kitchman, Jakub Cywinski and Zac Gvirtzman.
Most recently Burgoyne completed a series of recordings entitled Frescoes featuring Kit Downes, Emanuele Maniscalco, Sam Braysher, Tom Challenger, Xaver Rüegg and Fabien Ianonne which will be released in instalments on the new Zürich based record label 8004 Records. He and is developing a new piano trio in Firenze with Italian rising stars Alessandro Lanzoni and Michelangelo Scandroglio called “Wisteria Days”.
As a sideman, recent projects include; Kit Downes’ Dreamlife of Debris, The Yumi Ito Orchestra, The Francois Lana Trio, Ursula Bachmann’s Bewildered Hearts and The Alex Ventling Trio.
Outside of Jazz, Burgoyne studies the Rubāb; a traditional lute from Afghanistan with Professor John Baily and Ustad Daud Khan Sadozai, the Tabla with Sri Subhajit Brahmachari and is beginning to learn the Oboe. He also works as a professional photographer.
