Come in, sit down, and have a nice refreshing cuppa CHA….
…the exciting improvisation project from Bruce Coates, Chris Hobbs, and Virginia Anderson.
Coates, Hobbs, and Anderson have played together over the past twenty years in various groups; as a group, they have found a new distinctive sound that straddles the artistic space between free improvisation, minimalism, and experimental performance. Here’s a taste of CHA (with cream):
New CHA Album!
CHA: Live from Wigmore Hall is a new, hour-long album of clean, clear CHA improvisation from Wigmore Village Hall, Herefordshire. The improvisation is unedited, left just as it was played live on 6 January 2017, including an interruption from one of the villagers…. CHA: Live from Wigmore Hall can be tasted on the EMC Bandcamp page, and can be downloaded, with a souvenir pdf liner note, for £6. And see Virginia Anderson’s post on Live from Wigmore Hall on the Found Properties section of the EMC blog, and find out the joys of improv!
Personnel:
Bruce Coates (saxophones) is highly regarded on the Birmingham free improvisation (Frimp) scene (he’s worked with Paul Dunmall, Jamie Smith, John Edwards, Lol Coxhill and Mark Sanders). He co-founded the Birmingham Improvisers’ Orchestra (BIO) and founded the FrImp improvisation series. Here Bruce is improvising with Trevor Lines in the late 1980s at the age of sixteen:
Christopher Hobbs is probably best known for his membership in the classic lineup of the legendary free improvising group AMM from 1968–71 (with Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe, Lou Gare, and Cornelius Cardew: see below for his iconic performance on Clapham Common in 1970), but he’s also recorded with the group SCHH ( Walt Shaw, Bruce Coates, Hobbs, and Mike Hurley). Nominally a pianist, Hobbs plays a wide variety of percussion, keyboard, computer and other electronic instruments in CHA.
Virginia Anderson (clarinets) played with the big band of the Redlands Improvisers’ Orchestra and co-founded the Anything Goes Örchestra, a Southern Californian improvisation group that broadcast a weekly all-night radio show in the 1980s and recorded a number of albums and singles (the picture is from the Anything Goes Örchestra ‘Quad on the Quad’ concert in January 1984). She is an exponent of new works and techniques for the Eb clarinet.
For more information:
You can contact CHA through the Experimental Music Catalogue: http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk , or email: questions**experimentalmusic.co.uk (for the ** substitute @).