Núria Andorrà studied at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe, where she now directs a doctoral programme dedicated to free improvisation in contemporary music. She is the artistic director of Improject Ensemble and artist-in-residence at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya. She collaborates with contemporary music ensembles: Icarus, Abstrai, Murtra, Patchwork, and Barcelona 216. Her repertoire comprises early classical music performed on historical trombones as well as contemporary improvised and jazz music. Since 1997 she has performed in Europe with such early music ensembles as La Fenice, Il Giardino Armonico, Les Talens Lyriques, but also with Ars Nova et Zellig, Kent Carter String Trio, Maxiphone, as well as in the trio Les Cannibales, which she co-founded with Julien Padovani and Vincent Boisseau.
US-born avant-garde jazz and contemporary music singer Lauren Newton has lived in Europe since 1974. She co-founded Vienna Art Orchestra, with which she performed till 1989. With Bobby McFerrin, Jeanne Lee, Urszula Dudziak, and Jay Clayton she founded Vocal Summit in 1982. Her debut album Timbre (1983) won her the prestigious German Record Critics’ Award (Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik). In 1998 she took part in the international conference ‘Frau Musica (nova)’ at Cologne’s Musikhochschule.
French bassist, improviser and composer Joëlle Léandre is one of European new music’s leading figures. Classically educated, she has performed with such contemporary music ensembles as l’Itinéraire, 2e2m, and Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain. She collaborated with Merce Cunningham and John Cage; the latter wrote music specially for her, as also did Giacinto Scelsi, Philippe Hersant, José-Luis Campana, Betsy Jolas, and about 40 other composers. She taught at the famous Mills College, Oakland, CA, and has been invited to perform in the most prestigious venues of Europe, Asia, and both Americas.
Pianist and composer Myra Melford, a Guggenheim scholarship holder, derives inspiration from a broad spectrum of cultural and spiritual traditions of Native American, Cuban, Near Eastern, African music, European and American jazz, as well as experimental contemporary music. However, she has not forgotten her roots in Chicago and the blues tradition. She engages in a dialogue of many cultures and in multimedia collaborations with actors, choreographers, and video artists. Since her debut in New York’s Downtown she has released more than 20 original albums and collaborated on 40 others, winning numerous accolades. She has lectured on contemporary and improvised music at the University of California in Berkeley since 2004.
Liquid Trio is a young Catalan ensemble of improvised music which includes the eminent, world-famous pianist, Agustí Fernández. They have recorded three albums, the most recent of which, The Liquid Trio Plays Bernoulli, came out on the day of their concert at Ad Libitum. In the first half of 2017 in Barcelona, Liquid Trio joined forces with two excellent Polish musicians, trumpeter Artur Majewski and Rafał Mazur, who plays acoustic bass guitar. Both of them are well known to our festival’s fans. During this concert, the Polish-Catalan line-up played for the Warsaw audience for the first time.
Like Ad Libitum 2017’s artist-in-residence Joëlle Léandre, Barry Guy emerges as an ideal artist whose masterful instrumental skills combine improvised and composed music into one universe of sound. We invited these two to play a concert for two double basses together for the first time in history.
The Mud Cavaliers need not be introduced to the Ad Libitum audience. One of them was the festival’s co-founder and frequently performed on its stage with invited artists; another has collaborated with our project for many years, producing its concert recordings, until he finally sat behind the microphone as a musician; the third led all the festival audience (at night!) to the Vistula river bank, to witness the musical mystery tour Missa pagana. From the very first edition of Ad Libitum in 2006, all the three cast a spell on students playing in the Orchestra of the Academy of Music in Warsaw using the charm ABLANATANALBA, which empowered the young musicians to improvise live as a collective!
Improvisation confronts one’s most personal, intimate sphere with that of one’s stage partner. Of special significance in this context are joint performances by musicians who perfectly know each other and are able to meet halfway in every sound. This is the case with Barry Guy and the Catalan pianist Agustí Fernández.
Few of the world’s musicians demonstrate equal virtuosity in inventive improvised displays and in Baroque counterpoint performed within an orchestra. To Barry Guy such a combination is nearly an everyday thing. He still plays in improvising orchestras and numerous small bands, but also in such famous early music ensembles as the Monteverdi Orchestra, London Classical Players, and Christopher Hogwood ‘s Academy of Ancient Music, to mention but a few. He collaborates with artists representing the Baroque and contemporary, improvised and pre-composed music, demonstrating mastery of musical communication in all these fields.
This phenomenal duo consist of Saadet Türköz, a Turkish born singer whose family and musical roots look back to the culture of the highland peoples of Central Asia, and Zlatko Kaučič, a Slovenian percussion master with a gift for turning nearly every object into a percussion instrument. Together they reveal to us an astonishing space of sound bridging the East to the West, a magical world of sophisticated types of sound and uncommon musical narrations combining ethnic music with free improvisation.
Violist and singer Charlotte Hug creates performances which exceed the boundaries of styles and aesthetics. Lucas Niggli, one of the most versatile percussion virtuosi, combines incredible precision with an African drumming pulse in his playing. Both are eager experimenters who boldly take advantage of unconventional means of expression. Though they have given few concerts together so far, all of them prove to be memorable events presented with an admirable dash and wealth of sound. They have already performed in Poland, but not together. Here is a new duo being born in front of our very eyes.
Europe’s oldest improvising orchestra, it was set up by Alexander von Schlippenbach more than half a century ago. Its beginnings are closely associated with Berlin Jazz Festival. In the spring of 1966, Schlippenbach was commissioned by the Festival curators, one of whom was Joachim Ernst Berendt, to compose a piece and perform it during the approaching third edition of that event. Since its foundation, Globe Unity’s line-up has changed many times, and included the greatest improvised music artists. During its first Polish concert, which took place at Ad Libitum festival, they were joined by Tomasz Stańko, who had previously already collaborated with that band.
