Shortly before the turn of the millennium, drummer and legendary co-founder of the groundbreaking improvisational ensemble AMM, Eddie Prévost, launched an improvisational workshop that still takes place weekly in London. It was here that he met recorder player Teresa Hackel and pianist and author David Grundy. The newly formed trio will open the evening before the screening of the film A Bright Nowhere – Journeying into Improvisation by filmmaker Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz. The film was made to mark Eddie Prévost’s 80th birthday and documents four days of concerts with exciting musicians from the British scene, including an AMM performance. This will be followed by a Q&A with Eddie Prévost and filmmakerStewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz.
Trio Eddie Prévost – David Grundy – Teresa Hackel
Eddie Prévost (UK): perc | David Grundy (UK/DE): pno | Teresa Hackel (DE/CH): rec
ImproVisions #6: A Bright Nowhere – Journeying into Improvisation
A film by Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz (103 min, UK, 2023) – celebrating Eddie Prévost on stage for a four day residency marking his 80th birthday
Film screening & Q&A
A documentary film constructed around a remarkable series of concerts of improvised music at London’s Café OTO. Filmed across four Saturday nights in July 2022 when over 30 musicians joined improviser, percussionist and animateur Eddie Prévost on stage for a residency marking his 80th birthday.
The film offers a candid look at improvisers who create music in the moment, free from the authority of a composer, score or conductor. The musicians focus entirely upon real-time collective exploration and as their compelling music unfolds the cameras take us to the heart of the action with revealing intimacy.
Including interviews with a selection of musicians including John Butcher, Ute Kanngiesser, Marjolaine Charbin, Nathan Moore, Alan Wilkinson, Sue Lynch, John Tilbury and Eddie Prévost. There is also a glimpse inside the weekly London improvisation workshop established by Prévost in 1999, and readings by musician and author David Toop.
The film reaches a powerful finale with a concert by AMM, the pioneering improvising group co-founded by Eddie Prévost in the mid-1960s. This was the group’s final performance – named as a Concert of the Year 2022 in The Wire magazine – a combustible duet between Eddie Prévost and Keith Rowe incorporating samples of recordings by the group’s absent third member, John Tilbury.
Elegantly filmed and astonishingly moving – The Wire
A film by HajduKino productions. Produced, directed, photographed and edited by Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz. Audio recordings mastered by Rupert Clervaux for Matchless Recordings and Publishing. Sleeve design Myah Chun Grierson at Studio Cymbal.
https://matchlessrecordings.com/music/bright-nowhere-journeying-improvisation
Eddie Prévost is a British percussionist, drummer, author, educator, and record producer. He began his musical career as a jazz drummer and co-founded the pioneering improvisational ensemble AMM in 1965.
“[Eddie Prévost’s] is one of the greatest metallurgists that music has produced. […] sparks delicately arcing through the air, of slow lava ingesting its surroundings, of the shifting grind of tectonic plates across each other, of the
rustle and glint of a firebird darting between shadows, and of ore smashing into the surface of the earth; but perhaps this language is overwrought: all that needs to be remarked upon is Prévost’s industry, his diligence.”
Nathan Moore — liner note to AMM’s ‘Indústria’ Matchless Recordings mrcd105
The recorder player Teresa Hackel, born in Berlin in 1981, is based in Switzerland since 2005. Her focus is free improvisation and composed contemporary music and she is keen to search for strange and unconventional sounds on the different types of the recorder. In her playing she values listening – there is no unnecessary sound, just the music that comes by itself.
David Grundy is a poet and scholar. He is the author of A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (2019) and Never By Itself Alone: Queer Poetry in Boston and San Francisco (2024), and is currently writing a book on free jazz. His writing on music appears in The Wire, Artforum, Blank Forms Journal, Critical Studies in Improvisation, and Point of Departure, and in liner notes to albums by artists including Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé. With Mattin, he is involved in a project on freedom and improvisation and on conducting Expanded Improvisation Workshops. He is part of the trio GUE and a duo with violinist Tansy Spinks, and has played with Oxford Improvisers and in Eddie Prévost’s London Improvisation Workshop.
