Two Ships Sail Again at the Beacon
BEN THOMPSON
The third incarnation of the Two Ship Festival of Improvised Music promises a feast of special encounters at The Beacon on the afternoon of Sunday 15 June. Among them is an eagerly awaited return to Hastings by the writer and musician David Toop, whose last performance here was an amazing double-header with Rie Nakajima at St Mary in the Castle just before the Covid lockdown days of February 2020.
“This time I’ll be in a duo with Mark Wastell,” Toop explains, “Mark will play a small drum kit, and me, my usual collection of flutes, cardboard boxes, leaves and sheets of paper. I think this will be the third time we’ve performed in this format. We both acknowledge that it’s to some degree a tribute to the John Stevens/Trevor Watts duo of the early 1970s that recorded great, minimalist, improvised music like Face to Face [CD, Watts and Stevens, 1995]. Mark is too young to have heard that group in person,” continues Toop, “but at the time I was taking part in John Stevens’ improvisation workshops and playing at the Little Theatre Club in London, sometimes as a support act to John and Trevor. Our duo is very contemporary improvised music, but it also has that sense of history.”
So the connection with Hastings’ free jazz silverback Watts crosses the generations? “For that reason it’s great to play on the same bill as Maggie Nicols,” Toop concurs. “Maggie played with John and Trevor in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in the late 60s, early 70s, so she’s a real pioneer of the music we play now. I have such admiration for the way she has sustained and developed her work as an improvising vocalist and teacher.” Jazz is the teacher, improvisation is the preacher!
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