Current Projects

Check out the samples on the jukebox page

 

· Real-Time

Real-Time is a new percussion/cornet trio playing a spirited dynamic chamber music drawing on a wide range of particular individual experiences.

Each participant has spent years studying and playing a number of quite different traditional and contemporary musics.

The players are equally at home playing structured musics and freely improvised musics. But the unity of Real-Time is a belief that the essential focus of the music they play is not music at all…but life essence.

Their performances are not about the notes, but the drives and aspirations of the simple human spirit which strives to know more about itself - and what it connects to.

Committed simplicity is the focus of the Real-Time group, and in that sense it is firmly in the tradition of many forms of music playing which deal principally with spirit.

At the same time their playing is musically wide-open.


Ken Hyder (dungur shaman drums, voice) began his recording career thirty years ago with Talisker, a pioneering band which fused his home-boy traditional Scottish music with avant garde jazz.

Gradually the specific jazz element decreased and his music expanded to take in other Celtic musics, South American and South African forms, and two spirit genres - Tibetan Buddhist, and shamanic musics.

He played drums with the Bardo State Orchestra which recorded and toured Europe with Tibetan monks. He's also played with and studied shamanic music with shamans in Siberia - principally in Tuva.

He has made over two dozen albums with a range of jazz, folk and avant-garde musicians.

"Ken Hyder's drumming always appears connected to the world beyond narrow musical concerns. It comes with a context, picking up on place, the past, people met and local practices. At the same time he favours strong, well-defined musical statements, entirely free from ornamental excess and fuss."
Julian Cowley, The Wire

Andy Knight (pocket cornet, flutes) started playing in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England in the 1980s.

Andy moved into improvised music, and experiments fusing free-jazz with rock and punk and funk.

He also played saxophones and worked and recorded with Specials punk musician, Jerry Dammers.

Andy also recorded with Scottish singer Pinky McLure - and at the other end of the musical spectrum with another Scottish singer, the international contemporary improvised music pioneer Maggie Nichols.

He has also worked in the theatre and has performed with dance music projects in London and Moscow.

Z'ev (percussion) is from Los Angeles, where he built his first drum set at the age of seven and began playing professionally when he was 12.

But swiftly his studies took him further out.

At California Institute of the Arts he studied Ethnomusicology (Ewe drumming (Ghana), Balinese gamelan & south Indian tala).

Later, he studied Qabalha with Rabbi J. Winston, Western Ceremonial Traditions with Aeryn Richmond, and Vou Dun Drumming with Haitian Hogun Rico Joves.

In San Francisco he was one of the founders of the Industrial Music/Art Movement.His book Rhythmajik was published in 1992 by Temple Press UK.

He has performed in more than 80 cities across 20 countries and has released over 30 albums.

"Z'EV's music is unique beyond compare and his complete mastery of texture and sound only adds to the unique character of his drumming."
Lucas Schleicher

His website is at http://rhythmajik.com/

MP3 - Stag-Ger Excerpt

 

RealTime's download-only cd on Ayler records at - http://www.ayler.com/_catalogue_dl.htm    

Raz3

This new acoustic trio - Lu Edmonds, Tim Hodgkinson and Ken Hyder -  is in the final stages of producing a CD which has been a year in the making. More info later....in the meantime go here to check an excerpt from the CD and find out more about linoleum.

 


This is Lu - click for more info.

A wee piece here.

 

· HYDER/MILLER DUO

 


Ken Hyder : drums


Vladimir Miller : piano

Debut CD - COUNTING ON ANGELS - SLAM SLAMCD251


Most of the playing Vladimir and I have done together has been in Russia - a country where day-to-day living is an improvisation more challenging than in most countries.

In life, Russians are accomplished improvisers. For every obstacle, they devise a solution. They have had many obstacles in their lives - therefore they are excellent improvisers. So being on the road as a musician in Russia is always - interesting.

Experience teaches you not to panic when the drumkit for a concert has no cymbal stands. You know that they'll find a way round it. In Leningrad a stage hand who used to take rock bands to perform in nuclear submarines, actually made a couple of cymbal stands between the sound-check and the gig.

The duo's music is inspired by some of the people and situations we encountered touring Russia. Flying over the snowclad Sayan Mountains in the depth of winter in a tiny plane to the magical Land of Eagles stays crisply in the mind.

And in Kyzyl, the capital, we waited spellbound in the wings as four shamans did the warm-up to the concert.

The snapshots we play are not literal. Instead they are the feelings generated by incidents, people and places. Feelings which linger in the memory.

"Ken Hyder's drumming always appears connected to the world beyond narrow musical concerns. It comes with a context, picking up on place, the past, people met and local practices.

"At the same time he favours strong, well-defined musical statements, entirely free from ornamental excess and fuss.

"His notes suggest that this liaison in London with pianist Vladimir Miller, renewing their association in the trio Northern Lights, is pervaded by their shared and separate experience of Russia.

"Certainly it's a fine match of temperaments, unsentimental yet emotionally charged. Miller, too avoids flamboyance, building solos through sure and steady accumulation, gravity in the harmonies, tenderness in the touch. Hyder's constructions draw equally on dance and industry, as self-sustaining as ritual, as functional as the chug of locomotive pistons."

Julian Cowley, The Wire

 

 

"Hyder's unusual pairing of shamanic beats with delicate percussion filigrees meshes so completely with Miller's tightly-drawn harmonic repetitions that you forget there's no bass player fleshing out the sound. Using the repetitively hypnotic left-hand vamps of a Mal Waldron and the forceful atonal right hand jabs of Cecil Taylor, Miller is both rooted and free, at once inviting us into his music whilst throwing down the shutters should we get too cosy."

Fred Grand - Jazz Review

The picture - supplied by our good friend Grigory Valov - is of Solovki monastery - on the White Sea archipelago of the same name.

 

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OR MP3

KEN HYDER/RAYMOND MACDONALD DUO

I started playing with fellow-Scot Raymond MacDonald in 2006. He plays alto and soprano saxes and is one of the more energetically exciting horn players to emerge in Scotland in recent years. He's starting to make a big name for himself as a soloist and as a bandleader.

In the Autumn we played together in public for the first time in Dundee with his sextet with Keith Tippett.

In the duo, we're covering a lot of ground - including developing some of the possibilities I explored in my first band, Talisker.

 

 

More info here.

 


· HOOTS AND ROOTS

Maggie Nicols and Ken Hyder have been playing together for over 25 years in various combinations. For each of them, HOOTS AND ROOTS is an opportunity to draw on their shared culture, and the songs they heard as children in Scotland. Maggie's roots also take in music from North Africa through her mother's family.


Ken's music has always had close links with different kinds of folk music. His celtic-jazz group TALISKER released half a dozen albums, and he has recorded with folk singers like Dick Gaughan, and with bagpipers Dave Brooks and Tomas Lynch. He has also recorded with Russian singers Valentina Ponomareva , Bolot Biryshev and Sainkho Namtchylak, and he travelled to Siberia to learn throat-singing.

Maggie has been in the forefront of European improvised music, playing with Keith Tippett, Irene Schweizer, John Stevens, Joelle Leandre, Conny Bauer, and Baby Sommer. She has for many years led workshops in voice and improvisation.

In HOOTS AND ROOTS they play the old songs, the laments, the songs of struggle, and the dance music of Scotland. Some of these pieces can be heard on - In The Stone, on Impetus Records. Of course they improvise too - but some of the tunes they use as springboards are centuries old.



Both performers are also widely experienced in running workshops.

New York's Fanfare magazine reviewing their performance on Talisker's LAND OF STONE album, noted :

"This is one of the all-time great albums of folk-jazz to come out of Britain - or anywhere - in the last 30 years."

And L'Alsace newspaper, on Hoots and Roots at the Mulhouse festival said:

"The music they unfold grabs the soul. It goes to the deepest levels, to the essentials. It's magisterial simplicity. You are gripped throughout - and the only regret is when it ends."

 

"Their performance at the Mulhouse festival subtly slipped between traditional Scottish folk songs and improvisation.


"By the way they lifted the emotion, the alternation of sufferings, joys and struggles, the inventiveness of Maggie Nicols, and the significantly just-right, economic and precise playing of Ken Hyder, Hoots and Roots gave one of the best concerts of the festival. A hugely thrilling performance."

Improjazz, France.

B&W pix of Hoots and Roots by Darek Szuste of " L'ALSACE "

And on their new work - SCOTLAND THE BRAVE - premiered in Norway ...

"Ken Hyder and Maggie Nicols - both Scots - have been playing together since the mid-1970s. Scottish traditional music was the starting point for their performance - for it was a theatrical performance as much as a concert - but it actually contained large and small bites from different music genres.

"To be able to keep the improvisation going on for almost one hour as they did - without it becoming toothless - demands a great deal of concentration and discipline from the artists. Their concert was an example of a successful improvisation - because both discipline and concentration were onstage. Hyder and Nichols were attentively listening to each other, but, at the same time, producing independent initiatives, which lifted the music to an even higher level.

"They went to the extremes to create their own expressions, following up each other's efforts continuously throughout the concert. Hyder's sound - like snowflakes falling - on his cymbals was meeting Nicols' soft and whispering voice as steady and as co-ordinated as when they let their music go with full force ahead.

"Nicols' song technique impressed as much as Hyder's ground-solid rhythmical accompaniment. Good timing and good handcraft - that's was it was."

Fredrikstad Blad


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· SHAMS

Since 1979 TIM HODGKINSON and KEN HYDER have been playing together in a project which has taken them to Siberia to study shamanic music and throat-singing as a part of their duo's development.
From their different backgrounds - Hodgkinson with the progressive rock band, Henry Cow, and Hyder with the Celtic jazz band, Talisker - they put their existing influences in the pot.
But they needed more, and their interest in shamanic music took them half way round the world to where shamans first appeared.

On their first trip to Siberia they played with Russian improvising musicians, and folk performers like throat-singer Anatoly Kokov in the Altai mountains. But they found no shamans.

The next year, they played and recorded with Russia's two most impressive avant garde singers, Valentina Ponomareva from Moscow, and Sainkho Namtchylak from Kyzyl, Tuva.
In 1992 they went back to Siberia, playing with Sergei and Marfa Rastarguev, Sakha folk musicians from Yakutia. On the shores of Lake Baikal they learned about purifying rituals from a Buryat shaman.

In Tuva, on the Mongolian border, they studied throat-singing, and played with the extraordinary shamanic-rock band from Kyzyl, Biosynthesis.
After another trip to Tuva in the winter of 1994, Ken and Tim went back to Siberia for a summer-long field trip in 1996 where they travelled to Olkhon - a holy island in Lake Baikal.

They also journeyed through Tuva and the Altai Republic studying shamanic music with practising shamans and playing with throat-singers including Gendos Chamzyryn and Bolot Biryshev. In Akademgorodok they met with two scientists, professors Vlail Kaznacheev and Alexander Trofimov who have been studying the techniques of shamans and have been conducting distant viewing experiments using hypo-magnetic chambers.

In 1998 they were part of a Radical Transcultural Initiatives expedition to the Altai mountains in southern Siberia playing with Tuvan throat-singer and sculptor Gendos Chamzyryn. They played impromptu concerts in remote villages alongside local "kai" throat-singers.

The American magazine, Boston Rock said in its review of their CD with Ponomareva : "They have the conversational aspect of lively improv, and often the trio transcends even that to achieve a sense of inevitability, a ritualistic completion of each other's gestures."

Reviewing the duo's live album,"Shams", David Ilic wrote: "Shams is about rediscovering the source, the great learning, the essence of music making. Every nuance of artifice stripped bare the music is nothing more than the creative act itself, the communication of two people in sound ... there is a mutual tempering of the individual urge - it's obvious by the sheer control and harmony of their playing that both men are listeners as well as players, editing with their ears, controlling the flow from second to second."

· Tim Hodgkinson studied anthropology before immersing himself in experimental rock and improvisation. As a composer, he has scored numerous pieces for contemporary music groups performing at Nancy Musique Action, Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte di Montepulciano, and Trondheim Nordlyd festivals. As a multi-instrumentalist performer he has toured all over theworld, recently playing in the Hermit Foundation symposium at Plasy, Bohemia in collaboration with Boris Bakal from Zagreb.

· Ken Hyder is a Scottish drummer/vocalist who pioneered European folk-jazz with his Celtic jazz ensemble, Talisker. Then he went on to play and record with South African, Irish, Brazilian and Russian musicians on over 20 records and CDs. He has performed throughout Europe, North America and Asia with Siberian shamans, and Tibetan and Japanese Buddhist monks. He also studied khoomei overtone singing in Tuva, on the Mongolian border.


We have previously collaborated with avant-rock band Yat Ha from Tuva, and Russian singers Valentina Ponomareva and Sainkho Namtchylak. Also Siberian tours with throat-singers Bolot Biryshev, from the Altai and Gendos Chamzyryn of Tuva.




 

 

 

Shams at a mountaintop in the Bergamo Alps, Italy


Shams' CD, "Burghan Interference" on Slam records. See Jukebox page for a track.

Burghan Interference can be obtained by Mail Order from Woof Records, 34A DULWICH RD, LONDON SE24 0PA
Payment in advance by International Money Order or sterling cheque sent to this address. Price £10, including postage to anywhere in the world.

Contact:- timpragma@compuserve.com

"Shams' CD - Burghan Interference - sensitively weaves Siberian influences into the tapestry of improv. Hyder's faraway vocal cries and sparing use of khoomei overtone style have an evocative, unpolished field recording quality, and he conjures further space with his light-touch cymbal play and skittering drum patterns.

"Hodgkinson's alto sax is persuasively querulous on 'Make Better Shake', and the steely twang and abrasive strums of his flat-guitar suggest a stripped down, primordial rock.

"Wonderfully paced, atmospheric improv by a first rate duo."

Chris Blackford, The Wire


Tim's biography

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· WORKSHOPS

Both solo - and with other performers like Tim Hodgkinson, Maggie Nicols, and Vladimir Miller - Ken Hyder has presented workshops on spirit music … improvisation … exploring ethnic music techniques.

He has conducted workshops for the Royal Academy of Music, Community Music and Music Works in Britain, and in Italy, Russia, Germany and Holland.

 

 

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