Breve at Plush - John Taylor, Hayden Chisholm and Matt Penman

A concert at St. John the Baptist church, Plush on 5 September 2008. Part of the Music at Plush festival.

2008 Concert (audio and HD video)
1. Year Old Telegraph (Penman)
2. So it Goes (Taylor)
3. In Daylight Mourning (Chisholm)
4. Sly Eyes (Wheeler)
5. Slow Gambol (Penman)
6. How Deep is the Ocean? (Berlin)

2007 Concert (audio only)
1. Patche (Penman)
2. Pure and Simple (Taylor)
3. A Flower is a Lovesome Thing (Strayhorn)
4. Augmented Ballad (Chisholm)
5. New Old Age / Dawn (Taylor / Wogram)
6. Summer Nights (Warren, Dubin)

HD Video and Audio – 1 hour 59 minutes

Although we filmed the 2007 concert we are releasing audio only as part of the Breve package – we feel that the picture quality of the video isn't up to scratch (it was our first film!) – but the audio is fantastic, listen and enjoy!

Director – Mark Kidel
Cameras – Tom Swindell, Amy Rose, Tom Maine and Mark Kidel
Audio recorded and mastered by Eric James for URM Audio
Video editing – Balsa Boskovic
Producer – Matthew Jolly

A trio ten years in the making...

Born in 1975 in Otahuhu, New Zealand, and raised in New Plymouth, the saxophonist and composer Hayden Chisholm is an internationally familiar figure on the Jazz and crossover music scenes. He studied music in Germany, and later in India and Japan. His compositions have been recorded by BBC and by WDR radio, and as an instrumentalist he has released several albums. He has created the music for several of Rebecca Horn's recent installations, most of which are touring the world, and is now one of the foremost lecturers on her work. As a soloist he has appeared with the WDR Big Band and WDR Symphony Orchestra, and has performed at major festivals throughout the world. As a speaker he has recorded and performed several projects around the work of James Joyce and has collaborated with Musikfabrik. He gives yearly masterclasses in Volos, Greece and currently lives in Barcelona and Cologne.

Matt Penman has been living in New York since moving there from his native New Zealand in 1995. He is a member of the San Francisco Jazz Collective under the direction of Joshua Redman, as well as the bands of Nils Wogram, Madeleine Peyroux and Bill McHenry. He is one of the first Call Jazz bassists and currently plays with John Scofield. Matt can be heard on about 60 CDs on various labels, and his compositions are featured on two co-led projects, Urbanism (Ode Records), and Flipside (Naxos Jazz), and on his debut CD as a leader, The Unquiet (Fresh Sound). His second release as a band leader will appear later this year on the Spanish label Fresh Sound. He has also appeared as Artist-in-Residence at the Brubeck Institute in Stockton, California.

John Taylor is currently a member of Kenny Wheeler's quartet and large ensemble and performs in duo and quartet settings with John Surman – their recording of Ambleside Days on ahum won critical acclaim. In 1996 John played organ on John Surman’s choral work Proverbs and Songs from Salisbury Cathedral, later released on ECM Records. During the 1990s he made several recordings also for ECM with Peter Erskine’s trio with Palle Danielsson on bass. John celebrated his 60th birthday year in 2002 with a Contemporary Music Network Tour in which he presented his new trio with the drummer Joey Baron and Marc Johnson on bass. The tour also featured the Creative Jazz Orchestra playing John's composition The Green Man Suite. In July 2002 John received the BBC Jazz Award for Best New Work for this suite. John has been professor of Jazz Piano at the Cologne College of Music since 1993 and became a Lecturer in Jazz at York University in 2005.

Jazz pianist composer and teacher John Taylor is not short of trophies, but his latest achievement is purely digital: the day he played this set, he had made the Number One spot on iTunes' jazz pages.

And no wonder: he is one of a handful of people who have defined the sound of both British and European jazz, typically through his work as a sideman or collaborator. Elegant and at times impressionistic, Taylor stalks a song, following its trail with allegory, and then pounces, revealing its meaning through masterful use of tension and release.

John Taylor first came to the attention of the jazz audience in 1969 when he partnered saxophonists Alan Skidmore and John Surman. The 1980s saw John working with groups led by Jan Garbarek, Enrico Rava, Gil Evans, Lee Konitz and Charlie Mariano as well as performing in duo contexts with Tony Coe and Steve Arguelles. John has been professor of Jazz Piano at the Cologne College of Music since 1993 and became a Lecturer in jazz at York University in 2005.

Hayden Chisholm first met John Taylor in Germany, while John was Professor for Piano at the Cologne Musikhochschule. Over a decade later, they have formed a trio and reunite for their second concert at the Music at Plush festival in Dorset. "Since first hearing John all those years ago in Cologne I had always dreamed of playing with him," he recalls. "We had often spoken of putting something together but never had a chance, so when Adrian [Brendel, the festival's director] approached me to play at Plush in 2007, the perfect opportunity arrived. Last year's concert in Plush with John and Matt was a first encounter and one we all cherished."

The trio's second outing highlights Hayden Chisholm's signature microtonal sound, achieved over ten years of experiment and research, and the hyper-accurate extemporisations of bassist Matt Penman. The strength and clarity of Taylor's compositions give the session its fire. Everyone can feel when a band lifts off, when it rises above the merely very good, when that spirit of invention which fires jazz takes over a group of musicians. No longer three separate players, at that point they have become a separate entity; it is the mind of the trio that drives them then, not those of the individuals involved. This happened during Taylor's final solo, and the roar that greeted its finish indicated that everyone there appreciated that magic had made its presence audible.

Ethan Ames, 2008