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 filmmaker Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz.
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’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.
