September and October this year seem to have gone by in a rapidly-moving blur, and suddenly here we are in November and I realise that I haven’t written a post for two months!
I have, as you may easily guess, been keeping busy: September saw me coaching on a strings and woodwind course with the excellent Colin Touchin, as well as giving a workshop at Haileybury College, where I worked with some of the students on playing electric violin, and also demonstrated the looping techniques which I use in my solo concerts. This was also the month that my son Chris started at Lincoln University, a rather major change for all of us! He has still found time to design the artwork for my new CD though…
The major event in October was an Ely Sinfonia concert in Ely Cathedral where I conducted, among other works, the Elgar Cello Concerto, played superbly by the renowned Raphael Wallfisch. This was the culmination of my first season as Artistic Director of Ely Sinfonia, and we managed to draw an audience of over 600 for what was an excellent concert.
I also gave a couple of solo recitals in October, including playing for the 2nd Norwich Festival of Live Looping, where I met up with the person who got me into looping in the first place, bass guitarist Steve Lawson. Also on the bill was the excellent Per Boysen, all the way from Sweden, and the Festival organiser, guitarist Andy Butler. At the end of the month I travelled to Glasgow for 4 days with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, playing the huge Messiaen masterpiece “Des Canyons Aux Etoiles”. For those who might be interested the concert we gave of this piece will be broadcast on Radio 3 on the evening of December 12th.
However my main efforts over the last two months have been towards the completion of my new CD “Ascension”. It’s now finally finished and is off to be pressed this week, for release by the end of the month. An ideal Christmas gift, if I say so myself!
This CD has evolved a lot from my original idea of a short CD single with about 15 minutes of music on it. It’s ending up coming in at 55 minutes and, in true Bingham style, has everything from Renaissance dance music on violins, recorders and percussion, to Led Zeppelin on multi-tracked violins! In between there’s some more Bartok Duos, and excellent Telemann Canonic Sonata, a wonderful choral piece by Pablo Casals, which I’ve arranged for strings, an arrangement of a Jeff Beck number with double bass and African drums, and, the title track, my own composition “Ascension”. There are 3 remaining tracks, all recorded live: A light-hearted, jazzy encore from a concert I gave with guitarist Jason Carter in Cambridge a few years ago, and, from the more recent past, two live sections from the very first completely improvised performance I’ve ever given! The details of this concert are in my blog post “Improvizone” and I decided that some of the music would work well as the first and last tracks on the CD….
“Ascension” can be pre-ordered from my shop now, and will be available from the beginning of December.
A word about Improvizone: This is a venture run by the excellent drummer Andy Booker, who I’ve been working with in the No-Man band. He invited me to play at one of the Improvizone gigs in north London a couple of weeks ago. These are basically concerts by a variety of improvising musicians in several different venues – the one I played was in a pub in Walthamstow, with a line up of violin, guitar, bass, drums and sound engineer. Os, who does fantastic live sound manipulation, also records the gigs live. Andy then puts edited highlights on to the Improvizone website. You can already listen to a couple of clips from the recent gig (plus 80 or so others from past events), with more excerpts to come. Do take a look at – and more particularly a listen to – the website: www.improvizone.com. Meanwhile here’s one of the clips:
This gig was a new experience for me: My first completely improvised concert! It’s hard to describe the feeling you get (particularly for a classically trained musician) when you allow yourself to block out everything except the music that is happening at that moment, with no written notes, or even the memory of written notes, to get between you and the collective creative process which is going on. It can be completely exhilarating.
