Barry Guy		bass, director (GB)
Agusti Fernandez		piano
Evan Parker		sax (GB)
Mats Gustafsson		sax, fluteophone (SE)
Hans Koch		sax, clarinets (CH)
Herb Robertson		trumpet (USA)
Johannes Bauer		trombone (DE)
Per Åke Holmlander		tuba (SE)
Paul Lytton		percussion (GB)
Raymond Strid		percussion (SE)

Barry Guy is one of the world’s leading bass soloists and improvisers, well known as director and founder of the London Jazz Composers Orchestra, also as a composer of new music for chamber ensembles and symphony orchestras has founded a new ensemble called the Barry Guy New Orchestra.

This all-star band brings together the biggest names in the world of contemporary Jazz and Improvisation from America, England, Sweden, Switzerland and Germany.

The world premiere of the new composition Inscape-Tableaux by Barry Guy was staged in Ireland for the “Mostly Modern Festival 2000″. During four days the musicians performed a unique set of trios, duos, solos and finally the new piece.

Open rehearsals and workshops provided an insight into the process of creating a new ensemble and into the intriguing combination of free improvisation and composed structures.

Evan Parker may be the most formidable saxophonist since John Coltrane. He plays Trane’s instruments, tenor and soprano, and lists Coltrane as one of his principal influences. Parker is emphatically not an “entertainer,” but a true artist who has developed an entirely new way to play the saxophone. He has developed the possibilities of unpremeditated music more deeply than almost anyone, creating a personal vocabulary that is simultaneously instantly recognisable and adaptable to the most varied of situations …”

Robert Spencer

His discography is so extensive that it has been published in book form and lists over 150 albums recorded over a period of more than three decades (Publisher Bandecc hi&Vivaldi by Francesco Martinelli) this will soon be updated since he has recorded a vast number of new CDs in the past few years.

Mats Gustafsson was born in Umeå, a town in the north of Sweden with a rich cultural life and an inspiring jazz scene. He is now one of the most significant new faces in improvised music. Combining great sensitivity and attention to detail with boundless energy. He has developed a close collaboration with an increasing number of top rank musicians, including bassist Barry Guy, violinist Philipp Wachsmann, cellist Günter Christmann, percussionist Michael Zerang, and more recently saxophonist Peter Brötzmann.

“Mats is the most modern of players where the genre tags of jazz, noise, experimental, avant-whatever are finally transcended to a new millennium – where compositional concepts are at once in check with open improvisation and a super-postmodernism becomes what we always wanted: rock & roll!”

Thurston Moore

Hans Koch worked first as a solo clarinettist in Winterthur and performed widely as a soloist and chamber musician. In the early Eighties he became involved in Jazz being influenced by musicians like John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton and Evan Parker. In his first trio with Martin Schütz and Marco Käppeli he began to experiment more and more with a mixture of composition and improvisation.

Since then his career as a free improviser and composer has brought him together with Cecil Taylor with whom he played in the “European Big band”, Shelley Hirsch, Butch Morris, David Moss, Andrew Cyrille and many of the leading European improvisers. With Barry Guy he has played as a Duo partner and his collaboration with the Swiss musicians Werner Lüdi, Stephan Wittwer and Fredi Studer has lead to numerous albums on the Intakt label and others.

“A brilliantly virtuosic, independent saxophonist and bass clarinettist with a beautiful, clear and convincing tone, a first class improviser, differentiated, powerful, rich in ideas and many-facetted”

Christian Rentsch

Herb Robertson is internationally renowned as an innovative instrumentalist, composer, and arranger in traditional and avant-garde jazz and new music. He has performed and recorded with Tim Berne, Mark Helias, John Zorn, George Gruntz, Bobby Previte, London Jazz Composers Orchestra, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, and Bill Frisell. He has also recorded five albums under his leadership for JMT.

“Herb Robertson has a voracious appetite for the jazz past, with an eye toward the future … He forced runs of superhuman length, power and density from his horn, yet his tone was amazingly clear and crisp. He used a range of half-values, split tones and mutes to introduce a breadth of tonal colourations to his performance. ”

NY Times

Johannes Bauer is best known for his work with his brother Connie Bauer and the bands “Doppelmoppel” and “Slawterhaus”, he is one of the most dramatic and articulate trombone players in the German improvising music scene and has made a substantial contribution to free and new music since the Seventies as a soloist, composer for improvising musicians and in various ensembles. He is instantly recognisable by his amazing sound, rhetoric and the seamless blend of highly theatrical and lyrical playing.

Per Åke Holmlander is one of the leading exponents of the new generation of improvisers and new music performers in Sweden. He is known both in the new music and free improvising scene as a virtuoso on the tuba with an amazing range of colours and dynamics.

He is a member of Mats Gustafsson’s NU Ensemble and Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers Orchestra amongst others, and is also well know for his contribution to music theatre.

Paul Lytton, one of the first members of the experimental British free-improvising avant-garde in London during the Sixties and early 1970s, was a founder member of the London Musicians Coop and the Aachen Musicians Cooperative.

He has been building own instruments since 1969 (Incus 14 features Evan Parker on the lyttonophone), and had an exhibition of the equipment in Wuppertal in 1980. Since 1975 has lived in Belgium. Founded Po Torch Records in 1976 with Paul Lovens, with whom he has recorded three duo albums.

Perhaps most well known in the UK and US as a member of the Parker/Guy/Lytton trio and, prior to that, for working in duo with Evan Parker. However, there are many recorded contributions to other groupings, most notably the London Jazz Composers Orchestra and King Ubu Orchestru, also recently ECM released a duo recording with Paul Lytton and Philipp Wachsmann called Some other Season.

Raymond Strid is one of the leading figures in the Swedish improvising scene. He regularly performs with Mats Gustafsson, Marilyn Crispell, Barry Guy in their respective trio and quartet formations. He is also in demand all over Europe and America to play in various larger ensembles.

“Raymond Strid is an explorer of sounds with an extremely sensitive ear, a percussionist who creates sonic rooms. ”

Jazz Review