Maggie Nicols & Dan Johnson / Aly Eissa / Chris Cundy - improvisations across borders.

This evening’s concert is drawn together to celebrate the release of ‘Contact’, a live recording of the first meeting between Maggie Nicols & Dan Johnson on stage at St Georges for the Bristol New Music festival. Two improvisers who share an approach to performance & collaboration based in radical forms of communality with the practice & politics of deep listening. 

There was heightened & expectant quiet in the hall as the two deeply respected musicians opened out an exploratory & moving conversation across voice, piano, gong drones & gentle, dynamic floor percussion including Maggie’s tap-dancing footwork.

As The Wire notes, Maggie has ‘an instantly recognisable presence and voice…she has invented a whole new art form all for herself’. Maggie joined London's legendary Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1968 as a free improvisation vocalist and became active running voice workshops with an involvement in local experimental theatre. She later joined the classic experimental big band Centipede, led by Keith Tippett, and in 1977, with musician/composer Lindsay Cooper, formed the influential Feminist Improvising Group.

Dan Johnson is a percussionist working in improvised sound and expanded composition. Undermining conventional notions of drumming, their experimental work manifests across a wide range of projects; from eight-hour solo improvisations responding to instructions provided by the audience, to invite-only performances in rail tunnels, lifts and public toilets, to non-hierarchical group improvisation project Ecstatic Drum Beats.

Dan is a certified Deep Listening Facilitator with the Centre for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York and has been a revelatory presence in a number of celebrated groups including Run Logan Run & EP/64 with Dali de Saint Paul alongside charged collaborations with Moor Mother & Valentina Magaletti

"From the very first sounds we made, the connection was profound and the music came through us almost effortlessly. It just keeps getting better” - Maggie Nicols

Aly Eissa is a self-taught oud player, composer, and improviser based in Cairo, Egypt. He was mentored by legendary composer Abdo Dagher and oud virtuoso Hazem Shahin. Aly’s style is expansive & open whilst deeply rooted in the Egyptian classical and folk traditions. 

In recent years Aly has amassed a strong body of work through solo, duo & trio releases including the celebrated album on Sublime Frequencies, with his trio group, The Handover (2024). The Handover recently performed at Glasgow’s Counterflows and it is a pleasure to welcome Aly to Bristol on a short tour visit from Egypt.

Chris Cundy is an award winning composer & performer with over two decades of international touring as a solo artist as well as collaborating with some of Europe’s leading free improvisation and contemporary classical artists. Chris specialises in the bass clarinet and rarified woodwind instruments. In 2024 he released his fourth solo album Of All The Common Flowers which explores a self-developed music of circular breathing, cross-rhythms, and archaic dance motifs.

No one turned away for lack of funds.