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John Butcher (musician)
Encyclopedia
University of Surrey
The University of Surrey is a university located within the county town of Guildford, Surrey in the South East of England. It received its charter on 9 September 1966, and was previously situated near Battersea Park in south-west London. The institution was known as Battersea College of Technology...
where he was studying physics. He received his PhD in theoretical physics with his thesis published as Spin effects in the production and weak decay of heavy Quarks. After that he left academia to focus on music. He began by playing conventional jazz (he has spoken of his initial skepticism concerning free improvisation), but quickly converted to a freer approach. He has taken the concern with the manipulation of multiphonics (split tones and false notes) bequeathed by earlier improvisers such as Evan Parker
Evan Parker
Evan Shaw Parker is a British free-improvising saxophone player from the European free jazz scene.Recording and performing prolifically with many collaborators, Parker was a pivotal figure in the development of European free jazz and free improvisation, and has pioneered or substantially expanded...
in new directions: though his earlier albums could be busy at times, he has come increasingly to focus on creating rich, slowly-changing strata of sounds (layers of hums, buzzes and brittle metallic noises). He has also experimented with the use of amplified saxophone and overdubbing (most notably on the solo album Invisible Ear). That said, he is also capable of playing quite lyrically: on soprano, especially, he will sometimes leaven a passage of abstraction with bursts of pennywhistle-like melody.
Butcher worked with Elton Dean
Elton Dean
Elton Dean was an English jazz musician who performed on alto saxophone, saxello and occasionally keyboard....
, Chris Burn, and Jon Corbett at first. Later he formed a trio with guitarist John Russell
John Russell (musician)
John Russell is an acoustic guitarist who has worked exclusively in the field of free improvisation since the 1970s. He has been active consistently during that time as a promoter of concerts of freely improvised music in London, providing hundreds of playing opportunities for both local and...
and violinist Phil Durrant, which recorded three albums and also served as the nucleus of News from the Shed, a shorter-lived quintet with Paul Lovens
Paul Lovens
Paul Lovens is a musician. He plays drums, percussion, singing saw and various selected and unselected cymbals. He has also performed with the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra and Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra....
and Radu Malfatti
Radu Malfatti
Radu Malfatti is an Austrian trombone player and composer. He was born in Innsbruck, in the province of Tyrol, on December 16, 1943. He has been described as "among the leaders in redefining the avant-garde as truly on-the-edge art." His work "since the early nineties.....
. Another key relationship has been with singer Phil Minton
Phil Minton
Phil Minton is a jazz/free-improvising vocalist and trumpeter.Minton is a highly dramatic baritone who tends to specialize in literary texts: he has sung lyrics by William Blake with Mike Westbrook's group, Daniil Kharms and Joseph Brodsky with Simon Nabatov, and extracts from James Joyce's...
, which included Butcher's participation in mouthfull of ecstacy, Minton's setting of texts from James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
's Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...
. More recently he has become centrally involved in the form of rarefied, minimalist improvisation that has been dubbed "electroacoustic improvisation" or "lowercase", most notably as a member of the pioneering Austrian group Polwechsel
Polwechsel
Polwechsel is a musical group founded in Vienna, Austria in 1993.Their music has mostly straddled a line between contemporary music and free improvisation, and is characterized by quiet volume, sustained drones, and slowly-developing structures....
. Other playing partners have included John Edwards
John Edwards
Johnny Reid "John" Edwards is an American politician, who served as a U.S. Senator from North Carolina. He was the Democratic nominee for Vice President in 2004, and was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and 2008.He defeated incumbent Republican Lauch Faircloth in...
, Simon Fell
Simon Fell
Simon H. Fell is a bassist and composer; he is primarily known for his work as a free improviser and the composer of ambitiously complex post-serialist works.Fell began playing double bass in 1973...
, Gino Robair
Gino Robair
Gino Robair is an American composer, improvisor, drummer, and percussionist. In his own work , he plays prepared/modified percussion, analog synthesizer, ebow and prepared piano, theremin, and bowed objects...
, Georg Gräwe, Gerry Hemingway
Gerry Hemingway
Gerry Hemingway is an American jazz composer and percussionist.He has performed with Ernst Reijseger, Anthony Davis, Earl Howard, Leo Smith, George Lewis, Anthony Braxton, Ray Anderson, Mark Helias, Reggie Workman, Michael Moore, Oliver Lake, Marilyn Crispell, Christy Doran, John Wolf Brennan, Don...
, and Dylan van der Schyff. A recent, self-released album, Cavern with Nightlife, included a duet with no-input-mixing-board specialist Toshimaru Nakamura
Toshimaru Nakamura
Toshimaru Nakamura is a Japanese musician, active in free improvisation and Japanese onkyo.He began his career playing rock and roll guitar, but gradually explored other types of music, even abandoning guitar and started working on circuit bending...
. Butcher's octet "john butcher group" debutet at the 2008 edition of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival is held in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England. It has a repertoire of cutting-edge jazz, orchestral, choral and electroacoustic performances, along with film, dance and music theatre...
.
Discography (Selection)
- 1989 News from the Shed
- 1995 Concert Moves
- 1999 Lights View
- 2000 Requests and Antisongs
- 2001 The Contest of Pleasure
- 2001 Vortices and Angels
- 2002 Apples of Gomorrah
- 2003 Invisible Ear
- 2003 Optic
- 2004 New Oakland Burr
- 2005 Albi Days
- 2006 Concentric
- 2008 Buffalo Pearl
- 2009 somethingtobesaid