Excited to share my new recording of Brazilian Choro…
New album now available for signed and numbered pre order! BUY
Music by Ernesto Nazareth, Chiquinha Gonzaga, Pixinguinha, Jacob do Bandolim, Jonas Pereira Da Silva, Guinga, Hermeto Pascoal and Huw Warren
Choro Choro ChoroNew solo piano album of Brazilian Choro is now available to preorder for £10 plus postage First 50 will be numbered and signedOfficially released on May 24th – Copies available on spring tour dates
June Ist SOLO Jazz Piano day at Cardiff University (1pm) Solo set as part of the 3rd annual Jazz Piuano Day which will aslo include a set of Duos with students
Other gigs! April 25th The Spin Oxford Spellbound with Iain Ballamy, Rob Luft, Misha Mollov-Abbado and Corrie Dick May 1st Flute and Tankard Cardiff Huw Warren Piano Steve Waterman Trumpet Yuri Goloubev Bass Andrew Bain Drums May 3rd Cardiff University Concert Hall 7pm Cardiff University Jazz Ensemble directed by Huw Warren with special guest Steve Waterman (Trumpet) May 4th Derry Jazz Festival, Derry NI with Christine Tobin’s 1000 Kisses Deep project (songs of Leonard Cohen) Christine Tobin Voice Phil Robson Guitar Huw Warren Accordion /Piano Neil O Loclainn Bass Adriano Adewale Percussion May 28th Flute and Tankard Cardiff Mike Walker Guitar Huw Warren Piano Bass tbc Andrew Bain Drums
A few nice bits of press recentlty over both the Plygain and Choro projects!
Here’s an interview with the ever-entertaining welsh writer Jon Gower for Nation Cymru
Jon Gower talks to a musically restless pianist about his recent exploration of the Plygain tradition.
In a thirty year career, the Welsh pianist composer Huw Warren has ranged widely and collaborated globally, championing the music of others, such as the Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal as well as generating album after album of his own material.
Plygain
His latest recording project has seen him team up with singer Angharad Jenkins to respond to Plygain carols on an album called Calennig.
‘I knew precious little about the actual music to begin with,’ says Warren. ‘I had been to a Plygain concert at Parc near Bala and it was an amazingly intense experience, with all of the community being there but I didn’t know much about the Plygain carols themselves. When Angharad Jenkins sent me a little recording of her singing some of them I thought they were really great, I loved them.’
Plygain carols come from a long tradition and are far removed from, say the silvery sound of jingle bells at Christmas, They are almost sombre in tone, and that’s one of the things Huw Warren loves about them.
‘To me they sound more like folk music, modal music, like plainchant even. They feel old in a nice way.’
New take on old songs
Huw Warren thinks that he and Angharad Jenkins have done something new with these old songs.
‘Plygain is three part harmony, we don’t do that. We’ve taken the melodies and reframed them in my arrangements of them. But what we’ve done respects the tradition. That’s the necessary balance – not challenging the tradition whilst doing something new. There will be purists who say you can’t do this to Plygain but it’s no different to what I did in the hymns project Duw a Wyr with Lleuwen Steffan, taking music you like and trying to frame it in the best possible way.’
Collaborations
Huw Warren has collaborated with many folk musicians in the past, most notably June Tabor who formed part of the trio ‘Quercus’ alongside saxophonist Ian Bellamy.
‘June wouldn’t worry about where the material came from, or what it was like stylistically, she was only interested in the words really and the melody we could always change. So I’ve been used to working on framing words. That’s an approach I’ve taken into many other collaborations.’
The one with Angharad Jenkins came about when they worked together on an online project under the umbrella of the National Eisteddfod. They were creating an advent calendar.
‘They asked Angharad to do something and she said she’d always wanted to work with me. She asked could we record some Plygain for this and sent me a little demo and it was great – that was my emotional response to the music, not a technical thing. It’s knowing that emotionally I can do something with it.’
Musical restlessness
Huw Warren’s creativity is generated in part from a kind of restlessness.
‘I have a low boredom threshold and also it’s to do with liking lots of different things and being able to able to play lots of different styles and sources. I don’t like the sort of situation where you see a band and they come on stage and you hear the first tune and you know that every tune is going to sound a little bit like that all night. I always pushed against that.’
It’s all a long way from his early experiences playing organ to accompany cabaret acts in a club.
‘My very first gig was still at school, in the Naval & Military Club in Port Tennant in Swansea. I learned some lessons there which still stay with me today. You accompanied a range of people: some would show up and be really professional and they’d have all the music but others would show up with some of the music while others would show up with none and expect you to know it all – songs such as ‘Ten Guitars’ which Engelbert Humperdinck made popular and things like ‘Green, Green Grass of Home.’
Cabaret
There was an element of bluffing in the early days.
‘I knew that if you didn’t make any sound at all the cabaret performers would know something was up! If you just played something, anything, they wouldn’t notice the wrong chord or anything so I learned all that I need to just by doing it. There I was, a teenager basically, suddenly playing organ three nights a way backing cabaret. I didn’t know many songs, a few Beatles songs but I didn’t know much about jazz at the time, I was beginning to listen to it but I never thought I’d play it. A former professional drummer came to work at the club and he said let’s go to play jazz at the jazz club in Swansea and I said ‘I don’t play jazz’ and he said ‘Yes you do’ so we went.’
Crossing genres
It led to a career which has seen him cross genres from pop through jazz to world music with ease, founding the jazz quartet ‘Perfect Houseplants’ and working with a huge range of artists such as Maria Pia De Vito, Kenny Wheeler, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello and saxophonist Mark Lockheart.
One of his most recent collaborations was with the saxophonist Iain Ballamy, performing a brand new commission inspired by the Irish Sea for the Symffoni Mara project performed for the very first time in the West Wales Arts Centre.
That restlessness of his is a bit like the sea itself, carrying a substantial cargo of tunes thither and hither. By now Huw Warren – currently visiting professor of Jazz Piano at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama – carries thousands of songs around in his head, or millions of notes.
‘It’s like saying how many words do you carry around in your head. A lot of jazz tunes do very similar things and when you learn more and more repertoire what you’re doing is learning just the bits that are slightly different rather than learning the whole thing. It’s not like learning a whole Beethoven piano concerto. Someone once said harmony is like Lego, it’s the same bricks being put together all but in different ways, making a different shaped house.’
Which means Huw Warren is a sort of champion house builder, creating confident musical architectures, or, in concert, raising the roof.
And here an interview for London Jazz News with Jon Turney….
Huw Warren – new albums: ‘Choro Choro Choro’ – launch 24 Jan. – + ‘Calennig’
Not for the first time, pianist and composer Huw Warren – a creative force for four decades now – has a brace of new projects to talk about for the turn of the year. A solo piano recording rooted in Brazilian Choro and a duo CD featuring traditional Welsh carols might sound worlds apart. Jon Turney spoke to him to hear what, aside from excellent music, they might have in common. Interview by Jon Turney.
At the Choro Coro Choro recording session. Photo courtesy of Huw Warren
Anyone who has enjoyed Huw Warren’s solo or trio recordings knows of his affinity for Brazilian music. It can manifest as a sudden burst of sunshine on a single track highlighting one of the country’s great composers, or as an entire project, as with the CD some years ago dedicated to Hermeto Pascoal.
Deeper investigation brings on the appetite for more, though. As he says, “I keep thinking I’ve done with it, then something else comes up”. This time, that something is a solo album of Choro tunes, the hybrid genre first heard in Brazil a little before the turn of the 19th century. Like much of the music of that country, it’s rhythmically vital, melodic, stuff, often quite complex but very danceable, deploying European classical harmony and Afro-American strains from Brazil’s vast, imported slave population to conjure a popular form with a beat.
Not quite respectable, but immensely successful, Choro fed into much other music-making, but still rewards study in its own right – a study Warren had the chance to pursue thanks to a small research grant from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama where he professes jazz piano. “I’ve known about Choro for long time, but the grant allowed me to dig a bit deeper.”
There’s plenty of digging to do: early Choro composers such as such as Ernesto Nazareth, Chiquinha Gonzaga and Pixinguinha were prolific and their contributions to a movement to create a new Brazilian music mean scores exist – lots of them. Warren, as well as interviewing contemporary scholars of the form, got a library together. “I had a huge pile of Choro books and that, plus Bach’s well-tempered clavier, was all I played for a month.”
Making them one’s own is the point, and he does, encouraged by the fact that, rather like ragtime, the original genre coalesced in a cultural milieu in which music creators were trying to make something new out of many disparate influences. As in the North, a by-product of slavery was a trading zone between European and African musics, and between classical and popular. Chopin preoccupied some of the composers. Some used counterpoint extensively. European dance rhythms, like the Polka, come into it. But there are other rhythmic feels to absorb, too. “I knew the word “maxixe”, and knew what the pattern was, but now I can play one!”
The music he recorded after this intense study is a convincing answer to the conundrum that has cropped up in other forays into music distant from his own background, and that was formalised this time as a research question: how do you take something from another culture without just appropriating it? For him, it’s a matter of “disrespecting it just enough” to make something new, without forcing it into a radically different, maybe incompatible context – avant garde jazz, say. For Choro there were a couple of things already working in his favour. “For me, the music sits on that line between Brazilian strains and jazz”. Improvisation, he says, is simply another flavour of this music, not the main business, as in jazz. And the ingredients all these composers used to create Choro were so various to start with that remixing them feel right.
Audiences will soon be able to judge the results for themselves. On the forthcoming CD, the solo piano set was imagined as a recital. “I actually recorded way more, but tried to select thinking how this would work as a set.” And there will be a few solo gigs – but the CD tour, with a launch at the Vortex on January 24th, sees the pieces arranged for a quartet. Tori Freestone, a fellow Pascoal devotee, will play flute, traditionally a lead instrument in Choro, with Yuri Goloubev on bass and Brazilian expatriate Adriano Adewale on drums.
Meanwhile, he is delighted with the response to another project reinventing a genre, this time the much older Welsh tradition of Plygain carols. Calennig – or New Year’s Gift – began as an online project with the Welsh folk artist Angharad Jenkins to celebrate the eisteddfod during lockdown. Remarkably, Jenkins, well-known as a violinist, had not sung for others before, but the duo’s recording sounds like the work of a vocal artist of the first order. They created arrangements of the carols, sung in Welsh, on the fly, informed by Warren’s many years working with singers such as Maria Pia De Vito and June Tabor.
The pieces here are traditionally performed unaccompanied, at gatherings where friends take turns to lead the singing. The Welsh of the carols, Warren avers, is fairly archaic, but the mood he describes is crystal clear to the Anglophone listener, “that understated, slightly somber, almost medieval feeling”. Just like Choro Choro Choro, the challenge is to make the music sound fresh without doing violence to the sources. “In a way, it’s like playing jazz standards: how do you not make it sound like other versions that have been done hundreds of times?” The tunes are refreshed here by the piano and violin accompaniment, the results having something of the quality of Warren and Tabor’s work with Quercus, sounding both timeless and modern. If you insist on categories, the result sounds more like folk than jazz, but “for me it’s all jazz. The improvisation is in the arrangements.” And, as he put it referring to the Choro sessions, the important thing, in arrangement or performance, is to “approach it with your heart rather than your head”. And that, no doubt, is what listeners will respond to in both projects.
Choro Choro Choro launches at the Vortex on 24 January, with other January gigs in Cardiff and Cambridge, and further dates to follow in May and June.
Thanks for another year of your support – coming to live gigs, buying CDs, downloads and scores, writing about projects…Very excited to share new releases and line ups in this new year.
Calennig, with Angharad Jenkins, has been a surprise hit…we had an amazing launch gig at RWCMD with a great student ensemble, and it has since been broadcast on BBC radios 2,3 and 4 as well as Radio Cymru. The last few copies of the CD are still available here, after that it will only be available as a download. We are planning a major tour and new material for next year!
“A harbour of calm against the business of the world. Just Sublime” Gaynor Funnell
and in Welsh this wonderful mention by Richard Wyn Jones….
I also did a couple of end of year interviews….LJN will publish an interview with Jon Turney in the next few days, and here is a chat I had with welsh writer Jon Gower.
New Record and project!
Very excited about a new project for 2024 based on Brazilian Choro. Thanks to a research grant from RWCMD, I’ve explored some early choros (Ernesto Nazareth, Chiquinha Gonzaga etc) and recorded a solo recording of these arrangements alongside some classic Pixinguinha, Hermeto, Guinga and a couple of originals. Choro Choro Choro will be available for preorder from late January with an official release on March 1st.
The first gig of the year will be at the brilliant Bath Jazz Weekend with long time collaborator Mark Lockheart and Yuri Goloubev. It’s a great line up, check out the rest of the festival….
Angharad Jenkins : Llais a ffidlau/Voice and violins Huw Warren : piano
Our new recording of Welsh Plygain carols is now available to pre-order!There are a limited number of signed and numbered copies available for pre-order for £10 + postage, with the launch being at RWCMD in Cardiff on November 23rd and the official launch on the Sienco label on December 1st…. more details
“Calennig is the Welsh tradition of celebrating and welcoming the New Year. It symbolises hope and new beginnings. With these qualities in mind, we have taken a fresh look at some of the traditional music of Wales at Christmas and New Year, with a particular focus on the beautiful, ancient Plygain carols. These carols would normally be heard unaccompanied, and most often in three-part harmony during the Plygain services of rural Wales, a tradition which has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. Whilst we’ve stayed true to the melodies and lyrics of these carols, they are dressed here in different clothes. This is a contemporary Welsh album which draws inspiration from, and deeply respects the unique traditions of Wales, but dances somewhere between the sonic worlds of jazz and folk”
You can preorder as a CD (with great artwork image of a Plygain Candlestick by Lowri Davies and design by Bedwyr ap Iestyn) or as a digital download Buy
The launch night on November 23rd at the Dora Stoutzker Hall is going to be presented as a special collaboration with the RWCMD jazz department (a really interesting 17 piece mixed ensemble to augment the arrangements); and will be followed by a special Amser Jazz Time on Friday November 24th, where jazz students will perform their own arrangements of traditional music from around the world!
November 10th – RWCMD Foyer (Amser Jazz Time) 5.30pm Free Entry! Large Ensemble special!
RWCMD Brazilian Ensemble directed by Huw Warren in a double bill with a tribute to Kamasi Washington. Music by Hermeto Pascoal, Baden Powell, João Bosco
Iain Ballamy+ Huw Warren November 14th Flute and Tankard Cardiff 8.30pm Iain Ballamy saxophone Huw Warren piano Yuri Goloubev bass £10/6 November 15th Bristol Music Club Iain Ballamy saxophone Huw Warren piano Yuri Goloubev bass info and book November 17th Peppers Fishguard Warren/Ballamy Duo Includes the first performance of a new Warren piece “tides of thought” commissioned for the Simffoni Mara project. Concert supported by ACW Noson Allan/Night Out
The next few months will see a couple of new releases including the plygain project with Angharad Jenkins – Calennig – album launch gig at the Dora Stoutzker Hall, Cardiff on November 23rd (details here) and a new solo piano recording Choro Choro Choro in the new year.
Choro has long been close to my heart, and thanks to a RWCMD research grant I was able to investigate in more depth the early (1880’s-1920’s) work of Ernesto Nazareth, Chiquinha Gonzaga and others. The project also includes music by Pixinguinha, Guinga, Hermeto Pascoal and two brand new original pieces written in response to my work on this material. I also made two lengthy interviews with brazilian musicians Jovino Santos Neto and Seu Gaio which will be available to view as part of the project.
Here are details of some projects and gigs over the next few weeks….
Feb 22nd 7.30pm – Bristol
Fringe Jazz presents HUW WARREN / MARK LOCKHEART / YURI GOLOUBEV at The BRISTOL MUSIC CLUB, 76 St Paul’s Road, Clifton. Bristol BS8 1LP on Wednesday 22nd February at 7PM. Tickets £18.
Huw Warren – Piano Mark Lockheart – Saxophones Yuri Goloubev – Double Bass
Doors Open 7pm Performance Starts at 7.30pm
Two of the UK’s finest jazz composers and founder members of the Perfect Houseplants reunite in trio format with the brilliant bassist Yuri Goloubev. The trio will be playing music from Huw and Mark’s critically acclaimed album ‘New Day’ (CammJazz) featuring mainly their original compositions and a selection of tunes by John Taylor and Hermeto Pascoal plus some reworkings of folk and jazz standards. Their improvisations bespeak deep understanding of each other’s musical personality, nothing forced or overstated, but precisely the kind of creative conversation you might expect from three old friends and musical partners in crime.
February 28th Cardiff, Flute and Tankard 8.30pm £10/6 The Perfect Houseplants Project Huw is joined by RWCMD students to play the music of genre defying UK group Perfect Houseplants! Huw Warren Piano, Coren Sithers, saxophone, Dan Vause saxophone, Elliot Warburton accordion, Cameron Saint bass, Tom Williams drums Here’s some footage of a recent concert at RWCMD https://www.youtube.com/live/SBvyCGkw2BQ?feature=share&t=2671
March 3rd RWCMD Cardiff 5.30pm AmserJazz Time performance in the foyer (free entry) RWCMD Brazilian Ensemble with special guest Matheus Prado directed by Huw Warren. Music by Jacob Do Bandolim, Joyce Morena, Egberto Gismonti, and of course Hermeto Pascoal!
March 24th Cardiff, The Yardbird Kings Road Yard, Pontcanna,Cardiff, CF11 9DF Huw Warren : Cowbois and Shepherds Huw Warren Piano Coren Sithers Saxophone Clem Saynor Bass George Povey Drums
March 28th Cardiff Flute and Tankard 8.30 pm £10/6 Huw Warren Piano Iain Ballamy Saxophone Yuri Goloubev Bass
March 29th Bristol Fringe Jazz presents IAIN BALLAMY QUARTET at The BRISTOL MUSIC CLUB, 76 St Paul’s Road, Clifton. Bristol BS8 1LP on Wednesday 29th March at 7PM. Tickets £18.
Iain Ballamy – Sax Huw Warren – Piano Nick Pini – Double Bass Andy Tween – Drums
Doors Open 7pm Performance Starts at 7.30pm
Very pleased to welcome back one of Europe’s top saxophonists to the club. For this visit, Iain Ballamy has teamed up with his close friend and long time collaborator the brilliant pianist Huw Warren in a quartet including the superb bassist Nick Pini and Bristol’s own Andy Tween on drums. Iain and Huw have been playing together for almost 20 years in both duo and quartet formats and the remarkable trio Quercus with the singer June Tabor who have released 2 albums on ECM
March 31st Fishguard Huw Warren Iain Ballamy duo 8pm £12.50 Peppers 16 West Street Fishguard Pembrokeshire SA65 9AE Info and tickets
Recording news! Also pleased to report that I’m just about to record a new solo project of Brazilian Choros including some amazing music from the late 19th century as well as more contempoary (and brand new!) pieces. The love affair with all aspects of Brazilian music continues….More news on this very soon as well as a couple of already recorded projects that will hopefully get an official release in 2023! As ever, mailing list subscribers will be the first to get any previews and special offers on recordings etc
Excited to let you know that I have a new recording project coming very soon! My ongoing love affair with brazilian music is visiting some early (and late) Choro next…recording in spring for an early autumn release.
To celebrate I’ve done a spotify playlist of some of my previous brazilian recordings including my own albums and collaborations with Maria Pia de Vito. Hope you enjoy…
Friday November 11th 7.30pm The Old Courthouse Theatre, Caernarfon
Please note that is a rescheduled date from October! An all Brazillian programme including Choros from 1890s to 1930’s, classics from Tom Jobim and modern masterpieces from Hermeto Pascoal and Egberto Gismonti. Looking forward to sharing this fun music with you. tickets £7.50 music from 7.30pm dining from 6pm info and book tickets
November 15th JT@80 A special gig at the Flute and Tankard in Cardiff celebrating the hugely influential pianist John Taylor in what would have been his 80th birthday year! Huw Warren piano Steve Waterman trumpet Yuri Goloubev bass Mark Whitlam drums 8.45 pm £10/6 more info
November 20th Huw Warren + WYJO A special afternoon concert (3pm) at the Wiltshire Music Centre, Bradford on Avon, with Huw as special guest of the Wiltshire Youth Jazz Orchestra. Featuring Warren original big band charts as well as small group pieces and music from South Africa and Brazil. info and book tickets
Perfect Houseplantson YouTube
Mark Lockheart has just uploaded an old and long deleted Houseplants track – Redcar. Our most straight ahead tune ever, but great fun….Check it out!
Huw Warren is one of Wales’ leading jazz musicians with a long and internationally acclaimed career of cross genre collaborations and recordings on major european labels such as ECM and CAM jazz. From 2012-2016 he was artist in residence at Brecon festival and curated the World Wide Wales series of international collaborations as well as premiering new commissions such as the Dylan Thomas project “Do Not go Gentle” and coordinating projects with young musicians from RWCMD and NYJW. His ongoing ‘love affair’ with Brazilian music has included the 2009 album Hermeto+, a trio record putting his own compositions alongside new arrangements of music by the great Hermeto Pascoal, several albums with Italian singer Maria Pia de Vito and another trio record Everything in Between from 2018. During this time he has performed and recorded with Brazilian luminaries such as Jovino Santos Neto, Chico Buarque, Adriano Adewale, Carlos Malta and Roberto Taufic.
This special and unique collaboration for Brecon Jazz is with Brazilian vocalist and percussionist Seu Gaio.To describe Seu Gaio in one word, you must use the word versatile. “Seu Gaio is one of those great musicians who dives into the big pot of Brazilian Popular Music with the purpose of bringing out new interpretations and a vast musical knowledge for his song writing” (Paulo Sa). This creative and innovative musician from Brazil, who carries West African heritage, was born and raised in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. He sings, writes songs, and plays a variety of Brazilian and West African percussion and stringed musical instruments. The quartet is completed by Ursula Harrison and George Povey, two of the rising young stars of the vibrant Cardiff jazz scene.
Expect a mix of Warren originals, Hermeto tunes and some great Brazilian Choro and Samba for listening and dancing!
Huw Warren 