FRESH THURSDAY is a regular event showcasing exciting new music alongside lots of candles, board games and a homecooked slap up dinner. If you have a nut allergy or are coeliac please choose the ticketing option that states the correct dietary requirement. Booking well in advance for this event is really helpful for us to know how many people we're catering for!

Two artists working at the forefront of radical & nuanced jazz present their new solo music.

A mainstay of Montreal’s avant-jazz, experimental and improv music community for many years, Jason Sharp is a saxophonist and electro-acoustic composer whose increasing focus on solo work since 2015 has yielded a unique corpus of music that fuses technology and the human body.

Jason Sharp will be bringing his new record ‘The Turning Centre Of A Still World’, to life. This is his first purely solo record and his most lucid, poignant, integral work to date. Jason Sharp conceived his third album as an interplay strictly bounded by his own body, his acoustic instrument, and his evolving bespoke electronic synthesis system. The album was visualised by a series of hand-processed & hand-painted Super8 films by abstract experimental filmmaker Guillaume Vallée.

Guillaume Vallée will be joining Jason, projecting an interactive version of his visual album which Constellation presented last year, reacting to Jason's heart rate. By distinction, for the shows in Copenhagen, Berlin and Dresden, Guillaume's films shall be projected as a backdrop to Jason's performance.

Using saxophones, foot-controlled bass pedals, and his own pulse – patched through a heart monitor routed to variegated signal paths that trigger modular synthesisers and samplers – Sharp paints with organic waves of glistening synthesis, pink noise and digitalia on The Turning Centre Of A Still World. Melodic strokes and harmonic shapes ripple and crest across ever-shifting seas, through an inclement cycle from dawn to dusk.

"The ease with which Vallée appears to have boarded Sharp’s flight is incredible and it’s no exaggeration to say it’s difficult to imagine the album playing out with any other accompaniment...Remarkable synergy at work here." - Underscore Music Magazine

 Faye MacCalman is a performer, composer-songwriter and improviser on saxophone, clarinet and voice. Freewheeling through genre boundaries inspired by jazz, blues-folk, minimalism and rock to name a few, Faye fuses experimental songwriting with off kilter patterns, heartfelt melodies and surreal atmospheres.

Faye is bandleader of critically acclaimed jazz-art-rock trio Archipelago, nominated for UK Jazz Act of the Year in the 2021 Jazz FM Awards after releasing their 2021 album

‘Echoes To The Sky’. Faye is also a current Jerwood Arts / Cheltenham Jazz Festival fellow, and her collaborations include

Arun Ghosh, Anna Meredith, Zoe Rahman, Maximo Park and The Unthanks.  

Currently Faye is creating a new AV installation called ‘Invisible, Real’ as part of the Jerwood Jazz Encounters Fellowship for Cheltenham Jazz Festival 2022 combining anonymously collected real life experiences of mental illness with floating projections, sound art and live solo performance.

Faye’s playing and compositions have featured on BBC Sounds, Worldwide FM, NTS Radio and Jazz FM including Faye’s most recent work ‘Redraw The Circles’, addressing classism in music and premiered by Huw Stephens on BBC6 Music, commissioned by New Creatives North.

“Providing food for thought on what jazz is and can become” Kevin Le Gendre, (British Council, BBC)

“Effortlessly virtuosic” - Neil March, Trust The Doc

“Moving…I lost myself” - Huw Stephens, BBC6 Music