Free Range goes nomadic

The Free Range series of Thursday night avant garde music, poetry and film nights no longer has a permanent home, now that Mrs. Jones' Kitchen has sold up (soon to become an ice cream parlour). For the rest of the year, it's going to be moving about between "pop-up venues" around the city. The last two were excellent:

5th November 2015
Kat Peddy's front room, St. Dunstans

A short solo piano set from Sam Bailey on Kat's battered old piano on which he'd never previously played, but from which he produced the usual range of extraordinary sounds from using his now-familiar toolkit of non-conventional implements:

We then got a truly dynamic set from Hello Skinny, the ever-evolving project based around Tom Skinner (wonderfully fluid drums), this time with Tom Herbert (double bass) plus Free Range semi-regular Robert Stillman (tenor sax). Both Tom's have played in Byron Wallen's band (who blew the roof off Mrs. Jones' to end the spring 2015 Free Range series). Sam returned to the piano for their last piece, to great effect.

12th November 2015
Water Lane Cafe

This featured The Miserichords, who are Mavernie Cunningham and Will Glanfeld of local legends The Happy Accidents, and Kiwi terpsichorean double bassist David Leahy. Mav reads and sings her poetry (the first I'd heard of it, and it's very good stuff), Will plays free-jazz bass clarinet and David does his usual boundaryless bass thing (minus the dancing). The cafe door was open, it being a mild night, and a duck on the adjacent River Stour got vocally involved in the end of one piece, much to the audience's amusement.

This was followed by some excellent "found" and "Tipex" poetry from Glaswegian poet Nick-e Melville (the later involving the selective deletion of words and letters from official documents and letters). There was a second poet, Jennifer Cooke, but I unfortunately had to leave early, but there is a recording, here: