tickets:
regular: 14,- €uro
students, disabled persons: 7,- €uro
doors: 7.30 pm CET
concert starts:
approx. 8.00 pm CET
John Butcher and I got to know each other at Klangspuren Schwaz 2021, where we had the opportunity to play together in a larger ensemble.
We decided to make music together as a duo – now the time has come and I’m really looking forward to this encounter.
Achim Kaufmann, Berlin in January 2025
Born in Brighton (1954) and living in London, John Butcher is a saxophonist whose work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback, unusual acoustics and non-concert locations. He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with a sense of place. Resonant Spaces, for example, is a collection of performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands....
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tickets:
regular: 14,- €uro
students, disabled persons: 7,- €uro
doors: 7.30 pm CET
concert starts:
approx. 8.00 pm CET
John Butcher and I got to know each other at Klangspuren Schwaz 2021, where we had the opportunity to play together in a larger ensemble.
We decided to make music together as a duo – now the time has come and I’m really looking forward to this encounter.
Achim Kaufmann, Berlin in January 2025
Born in Brighton (1954) and living in London, John Butcher is a saxophonist whose work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback, unusual acoustics and non-concert locations. He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with a sense of place. Resonant Spaces, for example, is a collection of performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.
Butcher originally studied Physics, but after publishing a PH.D (1982) on quantum chromodynamics he left academia and took off with music. He has since collaborated with hundreds of artists, some for many decades, including Derek Bailey, Eddie Prévost, Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Steve Beresford, Okkyung Lee, Andy Moor, Christian Marclay, Phil Minton, Rhodri Davies, Tony Buck, Magda Mayas and Matthew Shipp. Additionally he values occasional encounters – ranging from the WDR Sinfonieorchester and EX Orkest to duos with Akio Suzuki, Liz Allbee, Keiji Haino, David Toop, Sophie Agnel, Fred Frith and Joe McPhee.
Recent compositions include “Fluid Fixations” (an hcmf commission) “Penny Wands” for Futurist Intonarumori, “Good Liquor…” for the London Sinfonietta and “Tarab Cuts” (shortlisted for a British Composer’s Award)
„In the hands of London improvisor John Butcher, the saxophone can sound like anything, from a piece of hollowed out brass baubled with pads and valves to a hermetically sealed feedback system, a miniature sound environment teeming with ever-evolving note-forms, or a huge echo chamber inflicting dub scale damage on every breath.
His conceptions are invariably built around techniques designed to overcome more than a century of accrued musical and cultural baggage, utilising a variety of invasive and exploratory processes, including cranked amplification, close-miking and overdubbing, in a bid to rethink the instrument.
As a player he regularly draws on the saxophone’s most peripheral capabilities, recasting fingering patterns in terms of percussive codes, turning naturally occurring acoustic phenomena into virtual accompanists and making expressive use of ghost tones and accidentals.“
The Wire – David Keenan
“Extraordinarily powerful, Butcher’s saxophone may test the limits of one’s ear to make sense of the close and complex relationships that are put forth, but there’s an undeniable emotional depth and sheer beauty in his work that supersedes technicality and concept.”
Tiny Mix Tapes.
„John Butcher is without question the most jaw-dropping technician we’ve ever heard wielding a tenor, equally capable of brawny assault and textural meditations at the very edge of audibility. What makes him so compelling, though, is the taste and poetry behind everything he does.”
Time Out – New York
Achim Kaufmann has been active as a pianist and composer since the early 1980s.
The improvising trio Kaufmann/Gratkowski/de Joode, a duo with the Amsterdam-based reed player Michael Moore, and the piano trio grünen (with Christian Lillinger and Robert Landfermann) are among his most enduring projects.
Together with the poet and visual artist Gabriele Guenther, he conceived the multi-disciplinary Trokaan Project which combines aspects of improvised chamber music, poetry and text fragments with electro-acoustic textures.
He regularly performs in duo settings with Ignaz Schick, Yorgos Dimitriadis and Kalle Kalima, Sestetto Internazionale and M0VE (both with Harri Sjöström), and in a newly founded trio with Nick Dunston and Mariá Portugal.
Further collaborations include Han Bennink, George Lewis, Jim Black, Paul Lovens, Mark Dresser, Ingrid Laubrock, Tom Rainey, Shelley Hirsch, Okkyung Lee, Axel Dörner, Thomas Lehn, Steve Swallow, Al Foster and many others.
In 2001, Achim received the SWR jazz award and the renowned Albert Mangelsdorff award in 2015.
Since 2018, he has held a professorship for piano and ensemble at the Weimar Conservatory of Music.
www.achimkaufmann.com
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