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Phil Minton (UK), John Butcher (UK) and Erhard Hirt (Germany) first performed as a trio in 1991 - in London for the LMC. The group works within the vibrant tradition of new/improvised music - with each member a powerful individual stylist. Concerts and festivals have included Musique Action (Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy), Free Music (Antwerpen), November Music (Holland), Unerhört 11 (Bremerhaven), Prague, Arts Council tour of England. CD: TWO CONCERTS (FMP-OWN 90006) Minton is probably the most impressive vocal performer working in Europe today Penguin guide to jazz Butcher breaks open the extremes of the saxophone to find a more considered tongue John Butcher was born in Brighton, England and has lived in London since the late 1970s. His playing ranges through free improvisation, various structurings, his own compositions, multitracked saxophone pieces and work with live electronics, amplification and feedback. He has toured and broadcast throughout Europe, Japan and North America, and was featured, playing solo, in the BBC TV programme Date with an Artist. Compositions include pieces for Chris Burn’s Ensemble, the Austrian group Polwechsel and the American Rova Saxophone Quartet. Butcher started playing the saxophone at Surrey University, where he was studying physics - and his first concerts were in an ‘avant’ (for want of a better term) rock group. Hearing musicians like John Surman, Stan Tracey and Louis Moholo triggered an enthusiasm for jazz, and he started learning and playing in various small and large groups - often with pianist Chris Burn; and sometimes with his brother, Phil Butcher, on double bass. In 1977 he moved to Imperial College to began a Ph.D. on the theoretical properties of charmed quarks. He continued to work in Burn’s large Jazz Ensemble (which won the 1980 "BBC Big Band" competition), and toured with a variety of outfits (London Contemporary Dance Theatre, New Arts Consort, Extemporary Dance - for instance). At the same time, he was struggling to find the ways of playing that eventually led him to a commitment to ‘free’ improvisation. Rehearsals and monthly concerts, with Chris Burn, at the Workers' Music Association in Notting Hill Gate were an important ingredient. After getting his doctorate in 1982, Butcher left academia and went off with music; releasing Fonetiks (1984) - a duo with Burn - and playing in trumpeter Jon Corbett's Freelance (with Elton Dean). Around this time he began working in trio with guitarist John Russell and violinist Phil Durrant. They started the label ACTA to release Conceits (1987) and were joined in 1988 by drummer Paul Lovens and trombonist Radu Malfatti to form News from the Shed. Various ad-hoc work in the ‘80s included a soprano quartet in Rome (with Evan Parker, Trevor Watts and Lol Coxhill), a DDR tour with trombonist Alan Tomlinson and drummer Willi Kellers - and a couple of concerts with Derek Bailey. Butcher later played in a number of Company Weeks; released a trio CD with Bailey and the tuba player Oren Marshall; and has two live duo pieces with Bailey on Vortices and Angels (2000). The quartet Frisque Concordance, formed in 1991 with Georg Gräwe and Martin Blume, meant more regular visits to Europe - whilst in London he joined what became the final version of John Steven's Spontaneous Music Ensemble. A New Distance contains their performance at the 1993 LMC Festival - the SME's last recorded concert. Throughout the ‘90s Butcher played in many contexts with singer Phil Minton and their collaborations continue with a new duo CD - Apples of Gomorrah - out on Grob. Minton's quartet (with Veryan Weston and Roger Turner) has taken Mouthfull of Ecstasy - utilising texts from Finnegans Wake - throughout Europe and the US. Other regular performances in the ‘90s included a duo with another singer - Vanessa Mackness; and with Chris Burn’s Ensemble and a trio with Minton and German guitarist Erhard Hirt. Electronic music was an early influence on Butcher's approach to saxophone playing, and has become explicit in his electromanipulation duo with Phil Durrant which started in 1997. In the same year he joined the Austrian group Polwechsel, which has released 3 CDs - the last a collaboration with laptop and guitar player Christian Fennez. Some commentators have described his ongoing wind trio with Axel Dörner and Xavier Charles as electronic music by acoustic instruments. In 2003/4 Butcher spent periods at STEIM, in Amsterdam, experimenting on software recognition of his saxophone techniques with Californian computer professor William Tsun-Yuk Hsu. Butcher was a director of the London Musicians' Collective from '93-'97. Around this time he also organised, with flautist Nancy Ruffer, two SoundArt festivals - programming composed and improvised music. He has given many workshops/lectures on improvisation and the saxophone (Royal College of Music, Barcelona Conservatory, Newfoundland Sound Symposium, Swindon Arts Centre, Parthenay Festival, Stanford University etc.) Since the late ‘90s Butcher has become involved with many North American musicians - in particular duos with three drummers; Gerry Hemingway, Gino Robair and Dylan van der Schyff; and a trio with cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm & drummer Michael Zerang. Other current groups include, Thermal with EX guitarist Andy Moor & synthplayer Thomas Lehn - a sax/bass/drums trio with Fabrizio Spera & John Edwards - and duos with John Edwards, Steve Beresford (electronics), harpist Rhodri Davies and Christof Kurzmann (laptop). Solo concerts have long been a particular enthusiasm, and 4½ solo CDs are available. The first, recently re-issued, was Thirteen Friendly Numbers which also includes pieces for multitracked saxophones, whilst London and Cologne and Fixations (14) focus on live performance. The recent, Invisible Ear (2003) explores close-miking, amplification and saxophone-controlled feedback, whilst the latest, Cavern with Nightlife includes a 2002 concert inside the Japanese Oya Stone mountain. As an improviser Butcher continues to play in many occasional, sometimes just one-off encounters. These have ranged from large groups such as Fred van Hove’s t’nonet - Radu Malfatti’s Orkestra - Butch Morris’ London Skyscraper - the EX Orkestra - to duo concerts with Fred Frith, Carlos Zingaro, Kaffe Matthews, Joe Morris, Jin Hi Kim, Toshimaru Nakamura and Paul Lovens. Phil Minton: Born Torquay, 2 November 1940; Trumpet, voice. When he was 15, Phil Minton started trumpet lessons in his home town and then, between 1959 and 1961 played with the Brian Waldron Quintet, the resident group at Torquay Town Hall supporting such acts as the Ted Heath Orchestra and B Bumble and the Stingers. On moving to London he played trumpet and sang with the Mike Westbrook Orchestra but in 1964 /65 undertook a residency in Los Palmas, Canary Islands, singing and playing trumpet with the English group Jonston Macphilbry. From 1966 he lived in Sweden for five years. On returning to London in 1971, Phil Minton re-joined Mike Westbrook and was involved in many of his projects up to 1990, touring extensively in Europe and playing at major festivals including Adelaide, Edinburgh, New York, Strasbourg and Berlin. In 1974 Phil Minton began working with experimental theatre groups such as Welfare State and IOU, formed the vocal group Voice with Maggie Nicols and Julie Tippetts in 1975, and from 1976 through the early 1980s he worked solo and in a number of improvising duos with Fred Frith, Roger Turner, Peter Brötzmann and with Günter Christmann's Vario project, touring extensively in Europe and to Russia, the USA and Australia. The improvising duos continued throughout the '80s with a variety of partners and this was mixed with more 'multi-media' work such as Konran Boermer's opera 'Apocalipsis cum figuris', Lindsay Cooper's 'Oh Moscow', Mike Figgis' theatre productions and Sally Potter's film 'Gold', as well as frequent guest appearances with European groups and orchestras. In 1988 Phil Minton was voted best Male Singer in Europe by International Jazz Forum. Veryan Weston and Phil Minton began their collaboration in 1987 and were commissioned by the Le Mans Festival in 1989 to write and perform Songs from a prison diary, a composition based on the prison writings of Ho Chi Minh for 22 voices. The work was premiered in 1990 and performed at Musica '91 in Strasbourg and awarded the Cornelius Cardew Composition Prize. Further work with Veryan Weston has included Naming the animals with Adrian Mitchell [recorded on Ways past]and, in 1992, Mahkno, a piece for eight voices commissioned by the Taklos Festival, Switzerland. The two musicians regularly play as a duo, including a performance at the Victoriaville Festival in Canada in 1995, and they received a commission from the Angelica Festival in Bologna, Italy which resulted in Past. Minton continues to work in a wide variety of situations and over the past few years these have included guest appearances with the Georg Graewe's GrubenKlangOrchester, Trio Raphiphi with Radu Malfatti and Phil Wachsmann, a trio with John Butcher and Erhard Hirt, Axon, a trio with Marcio Mattos and Martin Blume, Derek Bailey's Company, and Tony Oxley's Celebration Orchestra (including the performance to celebrate Oxley's 60th birthday in 1998. In 1993 he received an Arts Council Bursary for river run, a composition for voice, piano, percussion and reed instruments inspired by the works of James Joyce. This group, the Phil Minton Quartet or, alternatively, 'river run', has turned into a (moderately) regularly performing ensemble with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner and John Butcher. The Quartet toured Europe in 1996, appeared at the Victoriaville Festival in 1997, touring Germany the same year, undertook an Arts Council- supported tour of the UK in 1998 and appeared at the Vand'Oeurve Festival, and in 1999 played concerts in the US. In 1994, Phil Minton began the 'Feral Choir' project in Stockholm and Berlin and the 'Giving Voice' Festival in Cardiff, a series of workshops and rehearsals of compositions specially written for participating performers. In the same year he also toured the US with Bob Ostertag's electronic piece, Say no more. This started life as separate improvisations recorded independently and with no external guidance by Minton, Mark Dresser and Gerry Hemingway (with Joey Barron also in at the beginning, subsequently dropping out). Bob Ostertag then used an Ensoniq EPS16+ sampler and a Digidesign Protools Recording system to explode these solos into fragments and create a band piece from the splinters. This was recorded as Say no more. Ostertag then created a score of the compositions he had created on computer and gave this together with the computer-generated recording back to the musicians asking them to learn their parts for live performance. These parts were rehearsed and toured and formed the second CD, Say no more in person. The third stage - released as Verbatim - consists of the live tapes further exploded and reformed by Ostertag in his computer; the final version consisted of live interpretations of these secondary splinters and was premiered at the Taktlos Festival in Switzerland in March 1996, and appeared as Verbatim, flesh and blood. Phil Minton and Bob Ostertag also performed in duo in London in September 1996, a fragment of which has been released on a compilation Resonance CD. They also toured Verbatim the same year and undertook European and Japanese tours in 1998. In 1995 Minton appeared at the 'Voices of the world' festival in Copenhagen with Roger Turner and went on a European tour with Tom Cora. The association with Cora evolved through 1996 with a tour and recording of the quartet Roof (Minton, Cora, Luc Ex, Michael Vatcher), into 1997 and 1998 through further quartet tours, ending with Cora's untimely death. Since then, Veryan Weston has made up the quartet, now called 4 Walls and they toured in Europe in 1999. Radio broadcasts continue apace, particularly in contintental Europe; for example, in 1996 a portrait of Minton's work was created by Grace Yoon for SWF and SFB in Germany. He also continues to appear in less freely-improvised musical surroundings such as taking lead vocal in Carla Bley's revival of Escalator over the hill at the Köln Festival in 1997 then taking this on a European tour the following year, appearing in Franz Koglmann's composition O moon my pin-up in 1997, and the revival of Blake's Bright as fire with Mike Westbrook in 1996 and 1997. The mid-1990s onward have seen him as a moderately frequent visitor to Russian and Eastern European countries: a 1994 appearance at the Urals New Jazz Festival, a tour of Lapland with Roger Turner and Arne Forsen in 1995 plus an appearance at the Vocal Jazz Festival Novosibirsk in Siberia, and in 1999 a short solo tour of Russia taking in Leningrad, Moscow and Krasnoyarsk. He also tours Japan, including a 1998 tour with Sabu Toyozumi and other Japanese musicians and vocal workshops in Tokyo. begann Erhard Hirt im Alter von 16 Jahren in Leverkusen Bluesgitarre zu spielen. Ab 1970 spielte er in jazzorientierten und experimentellen Rockbands wie der rheinischen Jazz Community (1974). 1978 zog er zum Studieren nach Münster, wo ihn ein paar Gleichgesinnte aus der Heimat in ihre Kapelle aufnahmen: die Altum Corner Bluesband. Außerdem wurde er Gitarrist bei der Matt Walsh Blues Band (ab 1978) und der Delta Blues Band (1978-82). 1978 begann Erhart Hirt mit seiner, selten leicht verdaulichen, improvisierten Musik auch solo aufzutreten. Seitdem spielt er ständig mit verschiedenen Bands oder namhaften Jazz-Größen. Beispielsweise mit dem Erhard Hirt Quartett 1981 bei New Jazz Festival in Moers, dem europäischen Improvisationsorchester King Übü Orchestrü (ab 1984) oder mit Künstlern wir Paul Lytton oder dem Kontrabassisten Hans Schneider. 1980 begann er Workshops für freie Musik in Münster zu organisieren, 1984 erhielt er den Stadtmusikpreis des WDR in Köln. gibt es wohl kaum ein deutsches Jazz-Festival, bei dem Erhard Hirt noch keine Erfolge feiern konnte. Aber auch im Ausland sorgte er mit seiner eigenwilligen Musik für Begeisterung. So 1986 in der DDR, 1990 in Lettland, oder 1996 bei Konzerten in Großbritannien, den Niederlanden und der Tschechei, 2001 in Japan und natürlich bei seiner Solo-Tournee durch die USA im Jahr 2000. Die aktuellen Projekte des Erhard Hirt sind das Ensemble Echtzeit, das Diesner-Hirt-Duo sowie die Trios Minton Butcher Hirt und Theurer-Lehn-Hirt. This double CD-set is the companion to the final book reporting on the activities of Het Apollohuis. The recordings on these CDs give an idea of the music and the sound art presented in concerts at Het Apollohuis in the priod from 1980 through 1997. Out of a total of 500 performances I chose 38, from which exceprts of varying lenght have been included in this anthiology. These have been arranged in chronological order. The diversity of the selected pieces is characteristic of the programme of Het Apollohuis. Only limited number of composers and musicians who performed can be heard in brief fragments o these discs. Consequently a considerable number has been excluded. There simply was no way to include them all (this selection does not imply we value one above the other). The choice of the particular musicians has been my responsability (P: Panhuysen). liner notes: René van Peer sound selection: René Adriaans mastering: Frank Donkersgoed design: Tom Homburg, Marcel d'Anjou (Opera)