Loop Festival (March 15th -19th) – Alcyona Mick Interview

Loop Festival (March 15th -19th) – Interview with Alcyona Mick. Photo credit: Chuck Ferullo

Pianist/Composer Alcyona Mick is one of the founder members of the Loop Collective. She talked to me about her gig in forthcoming third Loop Collective Festival at the Forge Venue, on Friday March 18th at 8pm, when she will be performing her score for Sunrise, the FW Murnau silent film.

LondonJazz : How did the idea to present your soundtrack for FW Murnau’s Sunrise at the Loop Festival come about?

Alcyona Mick: At the Loop Collective all of us are keen to make the concerts in festival something out of the ordinary, not just regular gigs. Robin Fincker said to me “Why don’t you do one of your films?” This score was commissioned by Seven Inch Cinema and was premiered at the Flatpack Film Festival in March 2010, at St Martins Church in the centre of Birmingham, in partnership with Birmingham Jazz.

I’ve known the Seven Inch people for years, and have often played to accompany silent films. This was a bigger project, not just to play but to score, and it was made possible by an Arts Council grant. The idea of a London premiere at the Loop Festival just seemed like the right one.
LJ: What’s the film Sunrise about?

AM: Murnau was a celebrated German expressionist director who was given bottomless budgets by the studios in Hollywood. It’s a story of betrayal and forgiveness. A peasant couple is befriended by a lady from the city who pretends to fall in love with the husband but her real interest is to sell the couple's house. The husband attempts to kill his wife but can't go through with it. It’s about a seventy minute film and was made in 1927.

LJ: What about the music?

AM: It’s for three musicians, Geoff Hannan on violin, Jon Wygens on guitar, and myself. We perform live. Jon has an effects pedal, otherwise there are absolutely no electronics, and we perform it live in front of the movie. The London performance will have the same line-up as Birmingham last year. It got some good coverage. The difficult bit to score was to keep the pace going in the long section when the couple are reunited and relive their romance. The whole film, and particularly that part, is at a very different pace from films nowadays.

LJ: And you’ve been working quite a lot in film recently?

AM: Yes, I’ve just completed a two year masters at the National Film andTelevision School in Beaconsfield. In fact I graduated last Friday. There are 80-100 students, but only three composers. Gareth Lockrane did it a couple of years ago.

LJ: What other projects are you doing currently?

AM: Through the course I’ve been on tour quite a lot with Natacha Atlas, I’ve worked with Rachel Musson’s band Skein, and my trio Blink (with Robin Fincker and Paul Clarvis) has a new album coming out later in the year on Babel.

LJ: What else is going on at the Loop Festival?

AM: There's a great variety of things on, the French bands, the Irish bands... it will be quite a festival! I haven’t had a major role in putting it together but I did have an involvement in getting Jeanne Added invited . I saw her in Paris and asked her to do the solo project which she'll be performing at the festival. She’s got a fantastic voice and she’s an incredibly unique singer and musician.

LJ: Thank you, Alcyona.

FULL PROGRAMME FOR THE LOOP COLLECTIVE FESTIVAL MARCH 15th -19th

Alcyona Mick's new website contains two sequences from "Sunrise"

----Jeanne Added will perform at 9.30pm on the opening night, Wednesday March 16th. ----The last night of the Festival on Saturday 19th will be recorded by BBC Radio Jazz on 3. ----The Loop Collective Festival is supported by the French Music Bureau Export, Culture Ireland, the PRS Foundation and Arts Council England----

Interview: Gwilym Simcock

In advance of the London launch of "Good Days at Schloss Elmau" (ACT Music) at the Forge Venue, Camden on February 1st)," Thomas Gray interviewed Gwilym Simcock. (Photo credit: Bremen 2008 by William Ellis )

“It’s the ultimate hard thing for a piano player to do. You’re completely naked and there’s no hiding place,” says Gwilym Simcock of playing solo. “It’s really full-on from start to finish and you have to throw yourself into it whole-heartedly to get through it. Sometimes at the end of it you feel like you’ve been in a fight!”

This being the case, it is a fight he is unquestionably up for. While even some of the true greats of jazz piano have shied away from solo gigs or recordings, Simcock has already released two sets of solo material, the most recent being ‘Good Days At Schloss Elmau’, which he launches with a gig at the Forge in Camden next month.

Going it alone has been an important way of reconciling Simcock’s earlier classical training with jazz, which he discovered later on in his formative years as a musician. “When I first came to London to study jazz at college, the thing I loved about it was the interaction and playing with other musicians, so I threw myself into playing with bands. After about four or five years, you realise that if you’re just playing with bands all the time, you end up playing in a certain way and your left hand just becomes very familiar with comping. I was brought up to use the whole piano playing interesting classical music and felt I had let myself go a bit and needed to get back into shape.”

‘Good Days’ is Simcock’s debut for ACT, which boasts some formidable pianists in its catalogue, including the late Esbjörn Svensson and Vijay Iyer. For Simcock, however, there is little doubt about who has set the highest standards in solo jazz piano. “It’s hard to argue that Keith Jarrett isn’t the best player of the piano there’s ever been in jazz. To do what he does night after night and weave a whole concert out of nothing is pretty phenomenal.”

“The problem is, people always make the comparison between my music and Jarrett’s—which is incredibly flattering because I wouldn’t feel like I am even in the same stratosphere as he is. At the end of the day it’s still a piano; it’s not like a saxophone where you can have your own sound as a starting point. If you’re both playing a nice Steinway D then you’re starting with the same building blocks.”

So how does Simcock manage to step outside of the colossal shadow of Jarrett? A deep understanding of several different genres helps. On the buoyant opening track ‘These are the Good Days’, Simcock coaxes complex polyrhythms from his instrument akin to a Weather Report track and even achieves appropriately synth-like timbres through his voicings. It is an astonishing feat for a solo pianist. After this impressive start, he summons an array of textures and colours, from poignant romanticism (‘Can We Still Be Friends’) through to a meditative, Gershwin-esque take on the blues superimposed with meandering lines reminiscent of Messiaen (‘Gripper’). Intriguingly, there are also forays into twelve-tone composition and free improvisation (‘Wake-up Call’).

But far from sounding like an iPod set to shuffle, the album holds together remarkably well. The most obvious thread linking it together is Simcock’s distinctive and sophisticated harmonic language, which is becoming an unmistakable hallmark of his playing. And while some of the compositions are ferociously technical, a strong melodic line is never too far away. “I want to make the piano sing and prick people’s emotions and make music which moves you and takes you on a journey,” says Simcock.

This is perhaps most apparent seeing him live. At a recent warm-up gig at the Bull’s Head in Barnes, he seemed to pour himself into his instrument, utterly absorbed in the moment as he embarked on some fascinating departures from the material on the album. It is a setting he clearly relishes. “Many different things make up your mind-set, and that translates into the musical decisions you make. For me, that element should be really exciting as opposed to when you go to see someone like Britney Spears and you know that every last second of it is choreographed and it’s exactly the same every single concert…and auto-tuned!”

On February 1st at the Forge, we can expect to see a pianist in great shape who is unquestionably up to the intense rigours of solo performance, but most importantly, who never forgets to tell a story with his music and engage the audience in it.

Bookings for Feb 1st at www.forgevenue.org / ACT Music website