2024 has so far been an eventful year with much performing, recording and arranging, as well as organising and preparing for some big things coming up. I recorded my fourth album as a bandleader in February at Livingston Studios in North London, and it is almost finished and ready to come out at the start of next year. It is a record of all the music I’d written for my band in the previous 3 years and I’m super happy with how it’s sounding. We have a couple of gigs in October but are mainly holding out until next year to tour the album properly once it’s out, so watch this space. In the meantime a recent gig of ours had a wonderful review in Jazzwise magazine, and I also had some new band photos and solo shots taken by the amazing Matthew Johnson.
Next week on Friday 5th July my mother Viktoria Mullova and I are playing a late-night duo concert at the Wigmore Hall starting at 10 pm. It is our first (and currently only) gig in London in about 4 years. We’ll be playing music from our album Music We Love featuring a whole range from Bach to Brazil with some of my own pieces thrown in.
A year ago I was in Lugano recording an album for ECM Records with my long-time colleagues Alice Zawadzki and Fred Thomas which will be released in September. The album is called Za Górami (Polish for “behind the mountains”) and is a collection of folk tales that speak to the moon, the mountains, the rain, the madness of humans and the prophecies of birds. It was a tremendous honour to work with Manfred Eicher who produced the record, and Stefano Amerio who engineered, at the Auditorio Stelio Molo whose abundant acoustic and mood helped us to make something very special. Look out for some singles that will be released soon.
Last month I was involved in a wonderful project with Southbank Sinfonia at St John's Smith Square, where I arranged six pieces of mine for a classical chamber orchestra with the accompaniment of myself, Liam Dunachie on piano and Corrie Dick on drums, and made a point of getting the whole ensemble improvising together in places. It was my first time directing an orchestra, with moments of conducting with any free limbs I had available, and the orchestra, who were faced with loads of group improvising for the first time, were brilliant. Stay tuned for some footage from that concert. On the subject of compositions for orchestra, a piece I wrote at the end of last year The Stage Hand for the BBC Concert Orchestra was recorded in January for the BBC Music & Meditation Podcast released in March. You can listen to the piece on my SoundCloud page.
Finally, also last month I released a collaborative EP Hidden Mornings with the electronic music wizard Fozzle (a.k.a. Ben Mellefont). We took the stems from “Still, Hidden Morning” (my composition that I released as part of my 2017 Edition Records album Cross-Platform Interchange) and Ben created two brand new pieces mostly made up of samples from that track before we then spent months refining it together. The artwork is a photo I took during a sub-zero sunrise walk in Brixton's Brockwell Park shortly after returning from the Australian summer.
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