Recordings
piano piece piano piece (edition wandelweiser, EWR1005)
Tim Parkinson piano piece 2006 piano piece 2007
Philip Thomas (piano)
"Its hard to explain why I say this, but there is a freshness to this music I rather like. The playing feels light and airy, the notes bounce from one to another, and even though they don’t seem to go in the directions that might sound familiar there is something well formed about the music, it does sound complete somehow. Parkinson writes that he wanted to focus on the present, make each moment in the first piece a new beginning. This certainly feels like it has been achieved. As each part of the work begins I have found myself forgetting what came before. The unnatural progressions from one part of the music to another make it hard to pull the whole piece together in my head so I can evaluate the structure or overall atmosphere. Both of the pieces here sound more like musical journeys than concise works with a beginning, middle and end...If improvisation, at least in its formative years went in search of non-idiomatic playing then maybe this piano music is doing something similar, and coming very close to achieving it."
- Richard Pinnell, THE WATCHFUL EAR (for full review, click here
"Philip Thomas’ sublime recording of Tim Parkinson’s piano music recently released on Edition Wandelweiser will soothe the most fevered of brows. Formed of two extended works for solo piano - piano piece 2006 and piano piece 2007 – this is very precise, intelligent and simply beautiful music performed by Thomas at the absolute top of his game."
- Graham McKenzie (director, hcmf), SOUND AND MUSIC
I think this is meant well, but not entirely sure...! - "Whatever well-worn phrases like 'cutting edge' and 'state of the art' may have implied in more idealistic times, these two piano pieces by London based Tim Parkinson are effortlessly 'it'. Having absorbed Morton Feldman's parables about the limitations of dramatic rhetoric, about form-being-content-being-form too, Parkinson edits together scrappy bits of scales that stop suddenly, chord sequences that drop to bits, nonsequitur melodies and misterioso systems that repeat for irritatingly too long - all arranged with obvious high compositional intelligence to sound like what arbiters of 'good' compositional taste would certainly consider an embarrassing fuck-up. That's progress for you..."
- Philip Clarke, THE WIRE
the isolde scores (engraved glass, egcd033)
various artists offer performances in reponse to photographic scores by Jez Riley French.
featuring Michael Pisaro, Philip Thomas, Jez riley French & Daniel Jones, Anastasia Chrysanthakopoulou, Maile Colbert, Greg Stuart, Barry Chabala, Coastguard All Stars (incl. Philip on piano)
Very limited edition
"...The closing track, by philip thomas is (I think) played on a piano, but the thick, deep sinetones that dominate the music try and point elsewhere. Whether they were created in post production, or with some kind of live computer manipulation I don’t really know, but this sounds like more than just eBows placed on strings. Beyond these heavy tones there are rattles. rings and scrapes, some that sound like looping samples. I may have got this completely wrong and there may be no piano at work at all here, which would be disappointing as the music is quite affecting in its stark, almost confrontational simplicity and I’d like to think it was created, at least initially using acoustic means, but however it is made the track really gets into your head and bounces about inside as the incessant tone gets heavier and louder..."
- Richard Pinnell, THE WATCHFUL EAR (for full review, click here)
the middle distance (another timbre, at24)
Chris Burn piano, Simon H Fell double bass, Philip Thomas prepared piano
1. Looking ahead, seeing nothing
2. Not with the fire in me now
3. All moved
4. Never knew such silence
5. Looking back, remembering little
"Jo Fell's photograph of a bleak, snowbound country road in what I assume to be deepest Creuse in central France, where she and partner Simon have been based for a few years now, probably explains why we haven't seen much of Mr. Fell here in Paris. Happily, the five tracks on the album itself, recorded in Huddersfield, Yorkshire in February last year, are nowhere near as grey and forbidding as the cover – quite the opposite, in fact. Fell's double bass is strategically positioned dead centre in the mix, playing umpire in a musical tennis match (Mauricio Kagel's Match comes to mind on a number of occasions) between pianists Chris Burn (on the left) and Philip Thomas (on the right). The latter is credited as playing "prepared piano" while Burn's instrument is just indicated as "piano", but as he spends as much time inside it as he does tickling the ivories, the stereo placement is often the only way the listener has of figuring out which pianist is doing what.
Simon Fell is still perhaps best known for his volcanic free jazz work with Paul Hession and Alan Wilkinson, or for the intricate modernism of the compositions that make up the catalogue of his Bruce's Fingers label, but it's also worth remembering that it was Fell, in a trio with Graham Halliwell and Simon Vincent, who inaugurated the Erstwhile imprint over a decade ago. Similarly, the albums Chris Burn has released with his own Ensemble have often been loosely filed away under "lowercase", though despite their considerable delicacy they're much closer in feel to mainstream European Free Improvisation than anything on, say, Hibari. Philip Thomas's Comprovisation on Bruce's Fingers (2007) concentrated on the more complex end of the contemporary piano repertoire, but also included, alongside pieces by Burn, Fell, Mick Beck and Paul Obermayer, a nuanced – if rather brief – reading of Cage's Variations II.
It's clear then then we're talking three musicians with wide knowledge of several areas of new music, the boundary lines between which are as hard to detect here as the edge of the road in Jo Fell's photograph. The interaction is subtle and complex, and the listening – ours and theirs – is tense and intense. There's no need to fly off the handle and smash the ball out of the court (come to think of it, chess might be a better metaphor than tennis in the paragraph above): restraint is the name of the game. And despite the considerable timbral intricacy of the preparations, there's a keen ear for pitch at work throughout, best appreciated on the ebullient centrepiece of the disc, "All Moved". One wonders whether the album's five tracks haven't been sequenced deliberately to form one of Bela Bartók's beloved arch forms (a central scherzo bookended by slow movements bookended by outer movements recalls the Hungarian's celebrated String Quartet No. 5) – this, and the track titles' references to Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, is further evidence of the musicians' breadth of knowledge and deep engagement with several parallel traditions of musical thought and practice. It all adds up to a truly outstanding album, one that any self-respecting fan of new music in whatever form can't afford to be without."
- Dan Warburton, PARIS TRANSATLANTIC. For full review see here
"The Middle Distance – featuring Simon H Fell (bass), and pianists Chris Burn and Philip Thomas – draws on a bountiful reservoir of experimental histories. Thomas is known for his performances of Cage and 'complexity' composers like Michael Finnissy; in 1993 Burn issued a disc of piano music by pioneering American composer Henry Cowell, although his interest in composed means has been overshadowed by his reputation as an improvisor. Thomas, playing prepared piano, remains sonically distinst from Burn, but the music manages a noticeably unified soundworld. Fell leaves conventional bass rhetoric far behind as the musicians consciously match up their timbres; at 2'55” on track four, their extended techniques flow into a microtonal patois that trashes instrumental allegiance."
- Philip Clark THE WIRE (for full review of set of piano releases on another timbre click here
"Given the focus of these Altered Timbre discs on piano exploration, it’s almost a surprise to encounter The Middle Distance (AT 24) played by something like a band, a trio of Chris Burn on piano, Simon H. Fell on bass and Philip Thomas on prepared piano. What is particularly delightful is the way that the three interact. If two pianos usually suggest a degree of bombast, then Burn and Thomas are the antithesis of the typical. Each works with something resembling the meditative discretion of Tilbury or Lexer, a scattering of notes here, a sudden gesture to the interior there. Fell’s sense of line and pitch inflection make him an ideal (and equal) partner and the pianos are redefined in terms of timbral possibility rather than the usual density of harmony, line and event. The performance might serve as a model for the piano in small group free improvisation."
- Stuart Broomer, POINTS OF DEPARTURE, April 2010 (full review here)
"I should state right now though, that if you are one of those people that likes to pigeonhole improvised music into categories and then subsequently does not like the one labelled “EFI” then I probably wouldn’t read on any further. Although the music on The Middle Distance is actually quite varied, and is always very subtle and delicately balanced it is occasionally quite busy and expressive. It should also be added that it is often also quite quiet and spacious, but as wonderfully crafted as it is it probably won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, sadly.
So Fell plays double bass here, and Chris Burn and Philip Thomas each play piano, with Burn preparing his in advance, and so contributing a generally more percussive sound than Thomas, though neither plays it entirely straight. Thinking about it, although I have seen Thomas perform a number of times this might be the first instance I have heard of him improvising like this in a group formation. I may be wrong, but nothing springs immediately to mind. There are five tracks here then, each a concise piece in itself though its possible that all five were taken from one whole. From the start of the first track; Looking ahead, seeing nothing (an allusion to the uncertainty of improv?) the music is put together like some kind of finely crafted filigree sculpture, tense, full of anticipation and edgy precipices hanging over moments of silence. The interplay between the musicians is outstanding, there are three exceptional set of ears here, and the many years experience they share in the music is clear right from the outset. There is a chamber music feel to the recording, which is wonderfully captured in the resonant space that is the St Paul’s building at Huddersfield University. Everything is played entirely acoustically, and so we have the sound of a lot of strings here, struck, rubbed, bowed and hammered, combining wonderfully to create little sections of finely balanced sounds, some short some long, some tonal some percussive. It all just works so well. The second piece, a gradual, episodic thirteen minute study called Not with the fire in me now sounds almost composed, and given that all three musicians have worked with compositional structures quite often in the past maybe this isn’t such a crazy idea, but whether there is any preordained structure to the music or not it is clear that improvisation is at the heart of every one of the pieces here.
I love to hear piano played in improvised music like this, and Fell is such an able and versatile bassist that he finds a multitude of ways to wrap around the mix of scrapes and chimes from the pianists. The sense of shape and balance in the music is what really makes it for me. Nothing is overdone, bold statements are made when they are needed and there isn’t a fight to be heard. the musicians are working here to form a music together. This is just a great recording. It isn’t going to win any awards for innovation or have very many words written about it at online discussion boards, and it probably won’t sell out any time soon, but it is a wonderful fifty plus minutes of finely crafted improvisation that I have played a lot over recent weeks. I love to hear piano played in improvised music like this, and Fell is such an able and versatile bassist that he finds a multitude of ways to wrap around the mix of scrapes and chimes from the pianists. The opening passage of the final Looking back, remembering little is just great, a thunderous blend of pummeling deep piano booms matched by a heavy metal approach to bowed bass, in places almost reminding me of a more abstract Hendrix workout. Just as the opening is so powerfully direct, so the sections that follow are elegantly gentle, so underlining the varied nature of the music.
I thoroughly recommend this album to anyone that enjoys improvised music of any kind. My favourite improv disc of the year so far."
- Richard Pinnell, THE WATCHFUL EAR
"While all of these albums are musical, The Middle Distance is the most musicianly. Chris Burn plays directly on his piano’s strings, Philip Thomas modifies his; noted double bassist Simon Fell doesn’t touch a piano at all, although he’s done so elsewhere in his discography. The pianists each get one side of the stereo spectrum, but even if they didn’t it would not be hard to tell them apart. Although not totally allergic to touching the keys, Burn often uses the piano as a long stringed instrument, a harp or zither. Thomas’s modifications often turn his instrument into a percussion ensemble that happens to emit the odd key-strike. Fell wrenches cavernous groans and sprung wire sonorities from his bass. But more than the sounds, it’s how they find a fit together, break what they’ve found, and reassemble it that is the point. In other words, it’s all about interaction; you could, in the kindest and most appreciative way, call it good old-fashioned free improv.”
- Bill Meyer, SIGNAL TO NOISE
(reviewed alongside 'Piano(s)' by Diatribes/Demierre/Bourquenez): "Not your parents’ piano duos, these prime slabs of first-class improv should banish any memories of the achievements of Albert Ammons & Pete Johnson, Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington or even Jaki Byard & Howard Riley. Moving one step beyond the Jazz and Free Jazz of these earlier keyboard meetings, both British pianists Chris Burn and Philip Thomas on The Middle Distance and the Swiss-French recital featuring Jacques Demierre and Johann Bourquenez utilize so many extended techniques and unique string-and-key variants in their joint narratives that at times the pure piano-ness of the instrument almost vanishes into abstraction. Additionally the polyphonic textures supplied by bassist Simon H. Fell on The Middle Distance, and from drummer Cyril Bondi and electronic treatment from D’incise on Piano(s), become as much part of the interface with the pianos as they exist on their own.
More restrained, yet also enlivened by the stops, slaps and clinks from Philip Thomas’ prepared piano, the five instant compositions on The Middle Distance also draw on the participants’ experience in notated and improvised music. Bassist Simon Fell is equally at home at the head of large orchestral-oriented ensembles as playing in Free Jazz combos with drummer Paul Hession. Pianist Chris Burn also deals with compositions and free forms, although he’s probably best-known for the many ensembles in which he and saxophonist John Butcher have been involved. The youthful – under 40 at least – UK equivalent to Bourquenez, is Sheffield-based Thomas, a senior lecturer at the University of Huddersfield, who is involved with the so-called classical experimental ensemble Apartment House as well as improvised sounds with saxophonist/bassoonist Mick Beck.
On this CD Fell is as much a musical collaborator as the two pianists – especially at those junctures where his pulsated pops, reverberating thumps and sul ponticello slices appear to mirror – or is it vice versa – the taut rubber-band like thwacks and knife-plucking-like scrapes from Thomas’ instrument. As those two vie to destabilize the sound field with angular pacing, Burn does his part with rubato patterns and voicing which emphasize the piano’s accepted versatility. At points he stomps out thick rumbles with the pedals; at others exposes swift kinetic runs from the keyboard; and at other junctures posits full-fledged arpeggios.
Should Fell advance the polyphonic themes with triple-stopping or scrubbed bow bouncing; or Thomas slap the objects resting on the prepared strings to create high-pitched harpsichord-like reverb or node extensions; Burn has an appropriate response. Rumbling low notes at one end of the keyboard, or simple clamorous textures from the other add a staccato urgency to simplistic “Chop Sticks”-like clinks. Overall, his sequences flow sympathetically and nestle harmonically among the others’ physical gestures.
More than piano duos, these CDs are united in offering notable group creations."
- Ken Waxman, JAZZWORD
Comprovisation (Bruce’s Fingers, BF66)
Chris Burn - pressings and screenings (2005)
Michael Finnissy - Jazz (1976)
John Cage - Variations II (1961)
Paul Obermayer - Coil (2001)
Mick Beck - Not Just a Load of Balls (2005)
Simon H Fell - Composition No.73: Thirteen New Inventions (2005)
Derived from the concert series of the same name, this recording features five first published recordings (all except Cage) and three piece commissioned and premiered by Philip Thomas (Beck, Burn and Fell).
Available for download at reasonable price here
"The portmanteau title of this incisively played and very clearly recorded sequence reflects Thomas's dual interest in complex avant-garde music and free improvisation, and in the places where the extremes meet. Finnissy's Jazz, for instance, is both a spectacular notational extravagance and something close to freewheeling jazz. Paul Obermayer's coil is a less extreme instance of such complexity, and a most invigorating one, seeming to end with the atonal equivalent of a thumping cadence (but not quite doing so)."
- Paul Driver THE SUNDAY TIMES
"One of the pleasures of writing reviews is that from time to time you come across a totally unknown musical universe that really hits you. Overviewing the catalogue of the Bruce's Fingers label, it is clear that it is a high quality label of improvised and other contemporary music. The website of the label is very informative, giving lots of background information, through interviews with Fell, etc. Comprovisation is a solo CD by new music pianist Philip Thomas from Sheffield. He performs works from, besides Fell, Paul Obermayer, Chris Burn, Michael Finnissy, John Cage and Mick Beck, featuring music from recent series of concerts of the same name. The works by Beck, Burn and Fell were specially written for Thomas. All the works have in common that it are compositions that play with improvisation in one way or the other. The composition by Fell on this CD is called Thirteen New Inventions and is the result of Fell's research on Bach's keyboard repertoire. Some of the parts of this work are indeed close to Bach, in the way that the influence of Bach can be recognized. Other parts however are completely different in nature and dynamic. Thomas feels very much at home in this work and gives a fine and dedicated interpretation of all the compositions on this excellently recorded CD."
- Dolf Mulder VITAL WEEKLY
"The British new music pianist Philip Thomas specializes in performances of composers like Helmut Lachenmann, Christian Wolff, and Morton Feldman – in other words, music that mixes traditional notation with details of graphic or nonspecific indeterminacy, if not outright improvisation. His album Comprovisation (Bruce’s Fingers) not only includes scores of wildly contrasting nature by classical composers Michael Finnissy (a complexly notated piece of pastoral cascades interrupted by pummeling rhythms titled, perhaps with tongue-in-cheek, “Jazz”) and John Cage (his abstract “Variations II”), but compositions by musicians better known as free improvisers—pianist Chris Burn, multi-reedman Mick Beck, bassist Simon H. Fell, and (if I may coin another description) electronicist Paul Obermayer – which raises several questions. Do free improvisers bring a unique sensibility to a primarily classical format? Do any jazz influences remain audible? Obermayer, for one, is a member of the wildly unpredictable groups Bark! and Furt (the latter an electronic duo with cross-genre composer Richard Barrett), and his “coil” takes great pains to reconfigure a sequence of musical cells in and out of serial (post-Schönberg) procedures. The sharp rhythms and atonal melodies are reminiscent of gestures improvised by Howard Riley, in one sense, or events constructed by Stockhausen in his Klavierstücke for that matter, but there is nevertheless a studied rigidity to the phrasing that suggests this is notated and not spontaneously developed. Chris Burn’s “pressings and screenings,” conversely, alternate dynamically varied chords and clusters with drizzled notes that surreptitiously reveal slivers of Monk’s “Trinkle Tinkle” and “Epistrophy.” Of all these works, Fell’s “Composition No. 73: Thirteen New Inventions” is the most traditional – paradoxically, because he is the musician most accustomed to working with the freest of improvisers as well as the most experienced with modern orchestral maneuvers (as we shall see). His “Inventions” refer to J.S. Bach’s “Two-Part Inventions” for keyboard and, like Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Preludes and Fugues” op. 87, they adapt Bach’s contrapuntal form to his own melodic language. These are playful miniatures, with propulsive rhythms, hammered attacks, grand Lisztian gestures, classical allusions, and not much apparent jazz, as if that matters."
- Art Lange POINT OF DEPARTURE (on-line journal)
"CD solo debut for avant garde king: adventurous pianist Philip Thomas continues to enjoy himself exploring new pianistic boundaries and has just released his first solo CD..... Given the who's who of composers in his huge repertoire, few of them conventional, he is one of the UK's leading avant garde, a term rarely used now - it's either new, progressive or experimental music, pianists. A lot of Philip's success in performing much of the material he does is down to his utter belief in it and enthusiasm in exploring it, allied to rock-solid piano-playing technique. All this somehow manages to transmit itself on his new solo CD, Comprovisation (broadly, a term for notated music with elements of improvisation), the title of his last Sheffield concerts in 2005. Pieces by Paul Obermayer, Chris Burn and John Cage - Variations II, an exercise in timing - can be appreciated on a dispassionate cerebral level. For those wanting something a little more tangible, the standout pieces are Michael Finnissy's densely virtuosic Jazz and Simon H. Fell's Thirteen New Inventions, rather clever and skilful homage to Bach, commissioned and premiered by Philip at Persistence Works in December 2002."
- Bernard Lee SHEFFIELD TELEGRAPH
"At first it is frustrating that, despite telling us that these pieces are a mixture of the fully notated and the partly improvised, Philip Thomas doesn't expand his sleevenotes to tell us which are which. But it emerges on listening that this is partly the point. The very word, comprovisation, no longer acknowledges a division between the two. From compositions by improvisers like Mick Beck and Chris Burn, to compositions informed by improvisation, like Finnissy's Jazz, to compositions that vehemently resist improvisation against all expectations, like Cage's Variations II, Thomas has found several interesting points between the two poles. Paul Obermayer, best known as a laptop improviser with FURT and Bark!, was a good place to start the debate with his (presumably intricately notated) coil. Fans of Obermayer's work with Richard Barrett will know what to expect here: music compressed like raw carbon into diamond shards. This makes a gritty start to the CD to which it doesn't really return. In the next piece Burn brings a more obviously improvisatory feel through the frequent returns to collections of related gestures, which feel jazzy in their loose rhythms and the wide, swinging movements they demand of the pianist; this sort of playing is more characteristic of the rest of the disc. The Finnissy is perhaps more intellectually stimulated - it jazz-es rather than is jazz-y - but it still retains that impression of delicate flexibility that characterises much of his piano music. Its wide registral spacing nods towards Jelly Roll and boogie woogie; and its sudden shifts of character - as though structured around 16-bar verses - recall a wider jazz idiom. Mick Beck calls for balls of various weights and sizes, which are bounced around the inside of the piano and occasionally out onto the studio floor, and Simon Fell takes a final, different approach to the issue of accident versus control, basing his Inventions on improvisations on Bach, and coming up with the some of the most emotionally involving music of this CD. Although the musical quality is sometimes uneven, Thomas's concept in this recording - and the series of concerts from which it sprang - remains as valid as ever, and continues to engage many of the most interesting voices in British music. Comprovising without compromise."
- Tim Rutherford-Johnson NEW NOTES
