Alison Knowles Child Art Piece (1964)
Philip Corner Selection of piano works

Vocal Classics of the Black Avant-Garde:
Eric Dolphy Jim Crow (1962)
Archie Shepp On This Night (If That Great Day Would Come) (1965)
Joseph Jarman Non-Cognitive Aspects Of The City (1966)
Jeanne Lee In These Last Days (1979)
Jeanne Lee / Gunter Hampel Group The Capacity of this Room (1970)
Les McCann Compared to What (1969)

Moor Mother Live set

Performers:
Philip Corner
Phoebe Neville

Jason Yarde (MD) saxophones
Robert Mitchell piano
Byron Wallen trumpet
Dante Micheaux poet
Mark Sanders drums
Neil Charles double bass
Elaine Mitchener voice

Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother)

Our final take on New Intimacy sees the personal become intensely political. We open, however, by looking at the sensuous side of Fluxus with a visit from co-founder Philip Corner and Judson Church-choreographer Pheobe Neville, a husband and wife team. Following a rare intervention by Alison Knowles, Corner and Neville will perform a broad spread of Corner's delicate, ritualistic, Satie-like pieces for piano, works of great conceptual sensitivity and care.

After an interval, acclaimed vocalist Elaine Mitchener turns to the black avant-garde and to the overflow of experiment that occurred within improvised music, often springing directly from lived experiences of racial injustice.

'The repertoire for this 60 minute programme,' Mitchener writes, 'consists of a number of seminal works, drawn from the 1960/70s African-American avant-garde, which combine vocals and text with experimental jazz forms.

'These works illuminate an occluded moment in American cultural history, when the avant-garde aesthetics of new jazz doubled as a metaphor for the imminent politics of civil rights. Composed in very specific response to the perilous condition of black people in America, the works’ synthesis of experimental sensibilities, radical political sentiment, and gutbucket expression cuts across boundaries of time and space to resonate universally in the here and now. In the era of #BlackLivesMatter, these works speak powerfully of the need for resistance and resilience, sound stark and original, their hypermodernism firmly rooted in vernacular tradition.

'For Vocal Classics Of The Black Avant-Garde, highly charged and political works by Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp, Joseph Jarman, and Jeanne Lee will be re-interpreted and re-presented by an ensemble of leading UK jazz musicians brought together for this event by Elaine Mitchener Projects.'

We bring this story of resistance and resilience and hypermodernism up to the present day with a set from Philadelphia-based poet and composer Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), who, with Rasheedah Phillips, runs Black Quantum Futurism. Exploring the intersections of the material, political, scientific and historic in intense soundscapes and lyrical verse, Moor Mother will deliver a raw distillation of the black American experience.