PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT IS ADVANCE TICKET ONLY. The Winemaker’s Club 41A Farringdon Street, EC4A 4AN
Doors open 7.00 pm, music from 7.45 pm. Tickets £10.00 BUY NOW
Nearest tube Farringdon, 4 mins walk.
Because of the nature of the performance space we cannot seat latecomers until the interval.
The Winemakers is a strikingly atmospheric 70 capacity candle-lit stone arch in the vaults of Holborn Viaduct. It’s attached to the Winemakers Club, an independently run wine and craft beer bar. the bar is open to ticket holders only.
Fred Thomas’ Polyphonic Jazz Band explores improvised counterpoint in an uncompromising way through the medium of jazz standards. Eschewing the traditional chordal roles of harmonic instruments such as the piano and guitar, this ensemble instead seeks inspiration and transplants structural ideas from one of the richest resources in all of Western music history: Baroque Polyphony. Borrowing these surprisingly under-explored contrapuntal schemes and applying them to jazz music’s most cherished and often hackneyed songs has enabled Fred Thomas to research a very new way of interpreting this repertoire without written arrangements. This distinctive soundworld – cool, complex and beguiling, yet stylistically very open – results from the cumulative effect of diverse musical personalities weaving together simultaneous independent melodies and celebrating the liquid intricacy of a texture that derives from music two hundred years older than the birth of jazz. Along side band-leader Fred Thomas, Martin Speake (Paul Motian, Bobo Stenson), Mick Foster (Cleo Laine, LPO) and Phil Stevenson (Fofoulah, Iness Mezel) all bring their own voices to a genuinely new way of playing the old songs that still nourish our jazz culture.
“Fred Thomas is brilliant” – BBC Music Magazine
“Splendidly creative” – The Wire Magazine
“A beautiful thing” – Guy Garvey, BBC Radio 6
“Thomas is challenging the status quo” – The Creators Project
“High class” – The Telegraph
“A first-class double-bass/pianist” – Charlie Gillett
“Highly original” – Chris Parker
“Fred Thomas emerges as the leading voice” – OMH Music
“Fred Thomas provided an inexhaustible range of touch and colour” – Birmingham Post
“Not to be missed” – Benoît Delbecq
“A creative artist blessed with an abundance of imagination” – Hexagone
“In a word: sublime” – SilenceAndSound
Collages of field recordings, synth drones, mutated cornet and mysteriously evolving sound worlds collide in a solo set from electronic musician and cornetist Alex Bonney, a regular on the UK’s improv, jazz and experimental music scene. His debut solo vinyl ‘Excavations and Demolitions’ (Two Rivers) was recorded in a concrete factory in Italy in 2015: ”As in all the best playgrounds this is a thrilling carousel of discovery.” BBC 3 Late Junction
New Roots is committed to promoting events that shine a light on up and coming talent in the UK alt-folk scene. It’s committed to providing artists with an environment that is sympathetic to what they do, giving musicians the respect they and their music deserves- for this reason we ask for no talking and no use of mobile phones while artists are performing. Our music policy comes from the kitchen table, the roots of public performance- intimate, acoustic based, high quality musicianship with as little interference between performer and listener as possible.
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