Across three nights, Hamid Drake, William Parker, Nicole Mitchell and Pat Thomas come together as a quartet for the first time. This is a new configuration built from overlapping musical histories: Drake and Parker’s decades-long rhythmic partnership; Drake and Mitchell’s work together in the Indigo Trio; and Thomas’s established trio with Parker and Drake.

Each brings a profoundly individual musical language - Drake’s expansive sense of pulse, Parker’s rhythmic and melodic depth, Mitchell’s endlessly resourceful approach to the flute, and Thomas’s incisive, unmistakable voice at the piano. The residency gives this new ensemble the rare space to develop across three consecutive nights, allowing their existing affinities to be tested, extended and transformed.

Drake and Parker’s partnership reaches back decades, across ensembles including In Order to Survive and the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra. Mitchell and Drake’s Indigo Trio established another deep line of communication, while Parker, Drake and Thomas already share a trio history of their own.

Between them sit some of the defining currents of contemporary improvised music: Chicago’s AACM and Black experimental traditions; New York free jazz; European improvisation; and rhythmic languages shaped by reggae, African and Indian percussion. Mitchell’s Black Earth projects have connected composition to Afrofuturism and the writing of Octavia Butler, while Thomas has developed one of the most distinctive approaches to improvised piano in Britain.

An unmissable first coming together of four singular musicians with decades of history between them.

TICKETS:

Individual nights
£28 / £26 Advance / £18 Members

Three-night Series Pass
£72 Advance / £46 Members

→ Tickets via link in stories and cafeoto.pro

→ Doors 7.30pm