Liner Notes

The description of AMM’s music as ‘laminar’ came from Evan Parker, in a lecture he gave on improvisation during an Actual Music Festival at the ICA in London during August 1980. This he contrasted with the ‘atomistic’ approach of other practitioners. This idea of layers superimposed upon other layers has always seemed close to the actuality of AMM music. During listening sessions to select material for release, Keith Rowe and I have often played different AMM recordings simultaneously, switching in and out from one recording to another. It always produced interesting results. So, it should be no surprise that layers feature prominently in our material. The ‘submarine’ sandwich that is featured on this CD’s cover is a reminder of our first encounter with this dietary delight during our visit to the USA in 1971. Later that year Keith’s poster motif announced our concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London on 10th June 1971.

Of course, we take the ‘sandwich’ theme further not only by layering sounds in performance, but by giving you three layers of AMM music in this triple set which we have released to mark thirty years of making AMM music. In addition we have given you layers of commentary. In this instance four very difference approaches to thinking and writing about AMM music.

Victor Schonfield, who we first met in 1965, has an interesting reputation, being brave enough to organise Ornette Coleman’s Christian Wolff’s and Sun Ra’s Intergalactic Research Arkestra premier U.K. concerts . During that time he also organised tours and concerts for many on the new music, free- jazz and improvisation scene in London. But being first is often a dangerous position. Victor moved out of music promoting during the mid-seventies in part because of the constant financial strain to sustain things in the face of an unimaginative and mean-minded arts establishment, which didn’t know it had world-class innovative art begging for just a ‘little’ help. Here Victor shares his thoughts about his early experiences of AMM. And, I am happy to note, he still listens.

At the other end of the scale we have a whimsical reflection from Jim O’Rourke, who is young enough to be one of our sons. And, in a sense perhaps he is. But Jim, although an energetic young man with very distinctive creative ideas of his own, has long recognised that AMM music offered something even for his generation. Rightly, Jim focuses upon his formative experiences of various musical phenomena, in this case the unlikely conjunction of AMM and Kiss !

Malcolm LeGrice is an experimental film maker, who we have all known for years. But in particular he and Keith Rowe go back to their home roots in the west country of England. They came up to London at the same time from Plymouth to find their own respective ways in ‘art.’ Since the mid-1960s Malcolm has gone on to become internationally famous for his films and is Head Professor at the Harrow School of Design and Media. On occasions Malcolm and AMM collaborated and most notably, in recent times, AMM made the music for his Sketches for a Sensual Philosophy which was made for Channel Four in 1985. Some music from this same session was released by AMM as The Inexhaustible Document (Matchless Recordings MRCD13 , to which Malcolm also contributed the artwork).

Last but certainly not least, John Tilbury has some pertinent words to say. Adding to our sensibility of music-making, and following strongly in the footsteps of our late lamented colleague, Cornelius Cardew, who could always be counted upon to make pointed and pithy commentary. John’s style is more subtle, more rounded. I have to remind myself that Cornelius died over fifteen years ago, prematurely at forty-five. Surely his thinking would have got sharper and his prose style even more succinct than it was. John infers that he was a relative latecomer. This is of course only true in terms of his regular involvement with making AMM music. We worked with John first during the mid-1960s in particular realising Cardew’s Treatise (and he occasionally deputised for Cardew in AMM). And, of course, he and Cornelius were two very important figures in English new and experimental music of the late 1950s onwards.

Others have also contributed to the making of these CDs. Unfortunately, we have lost touch with the person who recorded the session in Aarhus in 1969. It was of course an analogue recording and by the time we listened to it - literally only earlier this year - it was in a sorry technical state. The concert at the wonderful Great Hall of Goldsmiths’ College, was in fact recorded on Keith’s Akai cassette recorder. This last fact I withheld from Adam Skeaping who is responsible for restoring the Aarhus and Goldsmiths’ recordings, using the new digital processing technology of which he is a leading exponent, and making it possible for us to release them. Through our early discussions he kept saying how wonderful it would be to have the original tape recording of the Goldsmiths’ session to work on. I just didn’t have the heart (or bottle) to tell him that the cassette was the original! We owe Adam a gratitude of debt and thank his (often unsung) help in restoring many recordings (especially those made in the early years of free improvisation) to something of their original glory. The third CD ‘Contextual’, was recorded in New York at a concert we gave at The Context Studios by James McLean. We thank him for such a sensitive and unobtrusive recording. The concert, part of our 1994 US tour, was produced by Bruce Lee Gallanter. We thank him and also Greg Bendian for the loan of some percussion.

One last, and very important point, and to return to the title and theme of this triple retrospective issue: Laminal. My guess is that Evan Parker is not aware of just how important his analysis has been to our own developing perception of AMM music. So, in some very significant way we owe him something. For this ,and as a tribute to his outstanding music, we would like to dedicate these recordings to him.

Eddie Prévost

When I was seven, the band Kiss were in their glory days and pretty much impossible to miss if you left your house. For some reason I hadn’t actually heard them but their album covers scared the hell out of me. Older kids were saying things like “if you ask Gene Simmons for his autograph, he sticks a spike through your arm!” This filled me with absolute terror and the image of the foursome made me imagine the most bonecrunching, ominous, most downright evil music on Earth, Years later I was teaching guitar to a seemingly endless supply of Beavis and Buttheads when one student brought in a Kiss cassette, wanting to learn a tune. It struck me that I still hadn’t heard them and was a bit excited to finally hear the obvious mayhem awaiting....

Years earlier: I had been listening to AMM for quite a while before I saw them, and was imagining, frankly, some wild looking folks. What kind of crazy scientists were creating music like this? Michael Nyman’s book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond which spoke of AMM had a picture of Keith Rowe playing a ‘guitar with a radio’ and he looked just like the Madison Avenue ad agents who had become comic figures in my childhood. Could it be? I was confused.

Back to Kiss : I put the cassette in, pressed play, and....”Wait a minute! This, this is Cowbell Rock!” I felt betrayed; where was that music I had heard in my head? I grudgingly moved on and wroteout the song for the student, thinking, “How can people who look like that make music like this?”

The Crypt: I saw The Crypt first at a radio station in Chicago while I was guest DJing. I ran for it knowing they had it at the station. For the first time I saw Keith Rowe’s beautiful pop art cover, and felt great that music like this would actually come in a boxset! I opened it up and found this picture. I balked at first. Could it be? What were these well dressed gentlemen doing? This wasn’t AMM. Then it struck me, HOW are they doing it? I threw on side one and listened and stared for a long time at that picture. I could not tell how these sounds came out of these instruments, it was a music unconnected to any of that, a music that could come right out of someone’s head, not needing the go-between of a cello or snare or guitar. I began to understand the majesty and mystery that is AMM. That high pitched noise, is that Cardew on the cello, is that Rowe on the, well whatever was hidden behind that amp. Where was the saxophone? I still look at that picture from time to time now that I’ve learned the technical ins and outs of how the sounds are made, but AMM remains a mystery that I can not necessarily articulate. Kiss had to put back on their make-up to achieve some success, the thing is, AMM never had any in the first place.

Jim O’Rourke

AMM C.1968
l.r. Keith Rowe, Cornelius Cardew, Lou Gare, Eddie Prevost

I think it was Alan Cohen who first took me to hear AMM, just as he had introduced me to the music of Mike Westbrook the year before. Not that anyone realised it was AMM. At that point it was simply the weekly play at the Royal College of Art in London, with a nucleus of Lou Gare and Keith Rowe, from the Westbook band, and Eddie Prévost, who played with Lou in a hard bop small group. It was November 1965, and I had recently organised Ornette Coleman’s first European concert.

After my visit, Eddie invited himself round to sell me a copy of their first LP, which was never issued: the engineer made a few acetates, then lost the tape. One side sounds like free jazz, the other sounds absolutely improvised - form as well as content, just like AMM. Once I listened I was hooked for life, and managed to attend more that a hundred sessions before the group broke up six years later.

By January 1966 Lou, Keith and Eddie were playing regularly as a quartet with Lawrence Sheaff, another Westbrook musician. Then Alen Cohen introduced Keith to Cornelius Cardew, the leading British apostle of the experimental classical music of John Cage and David Tudor. Keith brought Cornelius along and invited him to sit in, and it was just as if he had been there all along. Instead of jazz and classical music being at odds as always, it seemed they had actually become one and the same. Then as now I found this tremendously exciting, without quite knowing why (I have little interest in classical music, except the experimental variety). At any rate Cornelius immediately joined, and soon the group had chosen its name and made me its manager.

My main responsibility was simply to make sure the group had a place to play for nothing without being interrupted. Listeners were always welcome free of charge, but only as long as they did not interfere; interference was also welcome, but only from within the group. When I brought Ornette Coleman, Lou asked us to leave the room, as we were talking, and the time that Steve Lacy sat in, Lou asked him to stop playing. (By contrast, when I got Barry Miles to bring Paul McCartney he just listened, though when I asked him afterwards how he liked it he said they went on too long).

Money entered the picture only occasionally, most notably when AMM was invited for several days to Berlin in December 1969. This gave us a chance to fix a couple of extra gigs in Denmark on the way back. We all (AMM, me and my wife) went off in the AMM van through bitter winter weather deep into East Germany, then out again to Aarhus, for the performance you can hear on the first of the three enclosed CDs. The final date of the tour was a Danish Radio concert in Copenhagen where we were greeted by posters that proclaimed “AMM - leder Victor Schonfield.” It look me some time to live that one down.

Although John Tilbury has replaced Lou and Cornelius in the core group of AMM, its identity seems to me to be pretty much intact. The big difference between AMM up to 1972 and AMM since 1982 is not so much the musicians as the context in which they work.

There is a saying that everyone kills the thing they love, and I find that AMM’s current audiences tend to endanger the music. The trouble is that they are dying to applaud; give then half a chance, and off they go. (Are they clapping AMM for playing, or themselves for listening? Either way it is thoughtless and destructive). The musicians must therefore be constantly on the alert to prevent this, or else the music will be reduced from a continuous unfolding adventure to a mere collection of snippets.

The natural duration of an AMM piece is 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours. The music begins and ends some time before you become aware of it, rather like falling asleep and waking up again. The piece includes long stretches of silence and near silence during which everyone continues to listen as intently as before, discovering a whole new world of sounds which were previously hidden or overlooked. In order to function fully, there must be room for the AMM musician to explore various dialogues - not only with the other musicians, but with himself, with his instrument, and with the silence in which all sounds take place.

All these aspects of the music have come under attack, and for a very simple reason - economics. The original relationship with the audience was dictated by AMM: “we’ll let you listen, but only if you let us play.” As admission was free, the audience had to like it or lump it. However, the burden of day jobs was hard for the musicians to bear. Now that AMM is being paid to play the boot is on the other foot, and the audience can and does insist on its traditional prerogatives: the music must have a clear beginning, the artists must perform vigorously throughout with no slacking, and the audience has the right to decide when the group has finished. It is a tribute to the will and skill of the musicians that they have nonetheless remained creative, and kept the audience more or less under control.

Because AMM is so much more daring than other music, and so gripping, the temptation is to say that it is better. But that would be like saying a film is better than a poem, or life is better than a film. AMM is simply different. Western thinking about time is that it goes “tick, tock”; in fact time is continuous, and the same goes for all the other parameters of sound. Western thinking treats melody, harmony and tone colour as separate; AMM makes it clear they are all aspects of the same thing - pitch frequencies.

AMM moves on or comes together on any plane: it could be volume, speed or density as much as pitch. The most peaceful and united parts might be the ones which are busiest and most crowded. AMM uses all the dimensions of musical space to create the feeling that sound is a solid object in solid space - complete with size, shape, colour and texture. Everyone hears something different at an AMM performance. It depends where they are sitting, what they are focussing on, how long and at what stage they can concentrate, and how widely or narrowly. There is no whole or centre, only parts. AMM reveals the behaviour of sound, and its anomalies. Low sounds absorb high ones, loud sounds blot out soft ones, but most sounds placed side by side either co-exist, reach out to each other or merge. Sometimes you can hear one sound being squeezed until it splits into two or more. The melody need not be sound changing: it could simply be sound being.

One of AMM’s specialities is bringing two contrasting instrumental colours towards each other till they become one. We learn that every sound source has an enormous range of colours, and it can be impossible to tell where a given sound is coming from. At first I had trouble with the radios: they seemed like cheating, or changing the subject. Steve Lacy made me realise how they were just another instrument. If there was room for every other sound in AMM, then why not radios too? After all, the continuum of radio sound includes all those made by AMM, as well as everything else it is possible to hear. And above all, once a sound is part of AMM it is no longer what it was before. The trite and functional is found to be mysterious and fascinating, just as everyday shapes and objects are recreated by Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and Jasper Johns. AMM has often seem almost too loud, but never more than that, at least in my opinion. Tim Souster described it as “painful, but not unbearable.” Listening to AMM I have always tried to established a still attentiveness which cannot be disrupted either from without (eg. sudden loud noises) or within. Sometimes I find I can hear really clearly. Sometimes I just fall asleep.

Eddie likes to recall how, when Cornelius became an AMM member, he thought he was joining a jazz group. If only! In reality, as Cornelius soon found out, the relationship between jazz and AMM can only be called uneasy. Ironically, the dedication to spontaneity which AMM shares with jazz is precisely the factor which distances and divides the two. To put it bluntly, AMM has always seemed somehow too improvised to be jazz. In the last analysis, the jazz which is accepted as such is largely decided in advance, and largely the same from artist to artist, just like in other musics. AMM, on the other hand, has always managed to be that much more independent of others and free within itself. However, it is even harder to divorce AMM from jazz completely. All the founders were jazz musicians, albeit white and British, with no other conscious musical background or interests. Furthermore, jazz is the only western music which relies on improvisation at all.

We used to say that AMM plays AMM music, and three decades on that still seems to be the best description. Over the years an increasing number of improvising groups have seemed to sound quite like AMM - that is until you hear AMM again. Then you realise that the group still stands alone for power, excitement, delicacy and mastery. The truest affinity seems to be with a few older musicians who likewise get their music to go beyond music, beyond themselves. Examples are the recordings of Cage’s Fontana Mix, Sun Ra’s Outer Nothingness, and Tudor’s realisation of Christian Wolff’s For 1, 2 or 3 People. It is not just that these include AMM-like sounds grouped in AMM-like ways; it is the spirit that the sounds express. Sun Ra tries to reflect other worlds and other universes, Cage and his followers the workings or nature and chance. Similarly AMM brings something from outside - something bigger - into the music; an absolute commitment to the unique moment, the unique event.

This is why recordings are an unsatisfactory way to experience AMM (maybe they are unsatisfactory ways of experiencing any kind of live performance). In real life every moment could be different, and next time will never be the same. Once it is recorded, however, the unpredictability is lost, and the music starts turning into its own opposite. So these CDs are actually only a substitute for AMM - a part, or a reminder, or a way to prepare yourself for the real thing. Of course at the same time they are also an experience in their own right - a terrific one. Just don’t confuse it with being there at the time. And if you do get a chance to be there at the time, jump at it!

Victor Schonfield

What of the Music itself?

AMM emerged as a very special marriage between the two most significant strands of modern (Western) music - the axis represented by the history from Debussy, through Schoenberg to Cage - and the axis represented by Armstrong, Ellington, Gillespie or Parker. (The equal status of Jazz has never been properly acknowledged in musical history). But, if it is such a fusion of histories, then it has resulted in a form which is dominated by neither tradition and is challenging for both.

Over more than three decades AMM have developed and explored musical concepts whose characteristics remain uncompromisingly demanding as well as having produced music of great and seductive beauty.

One of the most important characteristics of AMM is that its 'meaning' has always been inside the music - inside the sound as an aesthetic experience. Despite attachment to certain political positions, the music has never been the translation of a message deriving from another discourse. Despite drawing on a wide range of musical cultures and methods of creating sound it has never been eclectic, never played post-modernist musical games, never engaged in musical gestures. I have never experienced a performance which does not seek to contain the diversity - including sounds from radios and other 'external' sources - into a transformation as music.

Given this 'positive' attachment to the terms of 'music' it is perhaps surprising how important negations have been in forming the structures explored by AMM.

Each of its performing musicians individually and collectively have demanded of themselves not to fall back on ready-made or repeated forms. The early insistence on removing notation, on not planing the shape of a performance, on responding to the present location, mood and intervention of the other musicians, helped to remove the formal domination of historical traditions - harmonic progression - consistent rhythm - coherent melody. And AMM did not fill the void as many composers have done by the short circuit of system or reversion to eclectic classicism.

However, by stripping away the overtly cultural determination of Classical and Jazz traditions, AMM encountered the deeper psycho-cultural constraint in the formation of and response to sound. These constraints are embodied in the space between the physicality of the body, the psychological response to sound and the region of unconscious enculturation. The overlaps in this area of habit, assumption, pleasure, pain, fear or delight related to sound cannot be solved in theory but can only be 'worked-on' or 'worked-through' in the process of forming the music.

In one respect, the improvisational approach of AMM - the ritual of setting up the instruments - the gradual entering into the undefined moment at which the sound and events of the surrounding space give way to the deliberately produced sounds of the music - is a process in which music is re-created always - in every new performance - from scratch. It is like the emergence of a universe - first the silence - which is never there but always some background noise - then the emergence of primitive force - tentative incoherent sound - the gradual emergence of pattern - broken - reformed - negated - affirmed - imperfect - interrupted. But - a model for a process working outwards from the primitive - the human primitive - at the same time a metaphorical creation from the elemental.

In musical terms the components of sound and form are the interplay between silence (imperfect) and sound - white noise undifferentiated becoming differentiated as tone - interval between events often longer durations becoming shorter durations recognisable as rhythm - rising and falling volumes taking on the shapes of gradual rise, gradual fall, sudden transition - harmonies or harmonics emerging from tones, picked up between musicians, refined, lost or destroyed by cross harmonics - fragments of identifiable notes becoming melodies again held, lost, destroyed. In this process there is within AMM a deliberate resistance or postponement of the recognisable musical patterns based in cultural habit - a reluctance to allow the music to settle into identifiable structures beyond the primitive modulations from which they derive.

As a result a dominant key, harmonic sequence, or rhythmic underpinning is rarely found or allowed to establish itself without the condition of reluctance. Instead the differentiation of duration - the experience of the passage of time through graduated void and uncertain marking of moments - the emergence of timbre constructed from the close harmonics of complex combinations of instruments and materials - replaces harmonic progression. The moments of melodic or rhythmic coherence become framed as temporary, special conditions of the movement of sound towards music, not, as in the dominant musical history, assumed to be the unquestioned bed-rock of composition. There is in this an implicit attempt to hold the music into a relationship between the human and the physical universe where the cultural can be seen as a fragile crust.

Each performance begins again - as far as possible - from nothing - without preconception - not only inventing the particular performance, but, in a sense re-creating the whole musical condition without reliance on the forms of its history - of course an impossibility.

Impossible - not only is the territory of musical exploration adopted by AMM a particular continuation in the history of music, but each performer carries a great and extending sophistication. This sophistication derives both from their own historical musical traditions but also it is gained from the years of taking themselves through the special musical process represented by AMM. Though the musical components are initially primitive, the modulation of duration, timbre, rhythm, harmonics, harmony and melody have become subtle and refined giving rise to musical performances with shape, emotional content, great musical beauty, power and distinction.

Their perpetual re-creation from the primitive is symbolic - a ritual striving which we, the listeners share, but where, for all the impossibility, from time to time we hear a new sound, a new musical pattern as it emerges for the first time - surprising us and the performers together.

The apparent determination of AMM not to plan or score performances despite their clear mastery of both the musical components, and their awareness of re-entering musical spaces they have previously explored, must surely be understood as a desire to retain the condition of presence over history for themselves and the audience. It is in this desire and their single minded attachment to the uncertainties of improvisation that AMM have produced some of the most memorable works of modern music.

Malcolm Le Grice

Note from a (relative) Latecomer

Music is erotic - we talk of music-lovers - and when it sings we recognise its erotic quality. All playing is an extension of singing. I learnt the veracity of this dictum from my first piano teacher, Mrs Symes, who was too nervous even to play to her pupils, who were mostly children; instead she sang everything. And she often would scrawl diagonally across the music, in large red letters, the word LISTEN.

Many years later I carry her teaching inside me, recognising with gratitude its bearing on my present concerns as an improvising musician. And it is the present that occupies me more and more. By ‘the present’ I mean now; in my music-making, in particular, ‘nowness’ has assumed a fragile preciousness and I strive, often unsuccessfully, to protect it from violation. In my own experience, particularly since playing regularly in AMM, I have discovered that it is in improvised music that this sense of ‘nowness’ is cherished and intensified; for improvisation, more than any other mode, recognises music’s transience, its uncatchability. Improvisation grasps every feature of every sound, every irretrievable moment; it exalts the accidental, the half-intended.

This affirmation of accidentalness draws the improviser closer to nature, to an identification with nature; the sounds which constitute the music are no longer external to him; and this ‘at oneness’, together with an emphasis on the physical and sensual qualities of the art of performance, create an intimacy, an indivisibility of musician and music which at its best is communicated to an audience. Actually, the word Nature is ill chosen; in the context of Art it often suggests a poetic, even mystical relation while the improvising musician’s relationship to his environment is rather prosaic; the objects of attention and contemplation are more often than not chairs, tables, rooms, windows from which the view may be ordinary, depressing. In improvisation we strive to capture from the commonplace the ‘whatness’ as Stephen explains in Portrait of the Artist. AMM’s pursuit is to ‘recognise the musical composition of the world.’

In AMM’s improvisations, to the richness and diversity of the sound material is added an even more potent source to draw upon: ones fellow musicians. And this accords, felicitously, with my own conviction that the relation of the individual to the collective is not antithetical, that individuality is achieved and refined not in spite of, but through others. There are moments in collective music-making when I recognise the virtues of selflessness, of understanding and forbearance, to which Cornelius Cardew referred: “Improvising in a group,” he wrote, “you have to accept not only the frailties of your fellow musicians, but also your own. Overcoming your instinctive revulsion against whatever is out of tune (in the broadest sense).”

This collective music-making arises out of dialogue, out of the constant interaction of aesthetic, moral and social considerations: a music-making which reaffirms an essential humanism. It is perhaps a sign of our times that reference to such considerations is met with disbelief or even hostility on the part of some critics. Some years ago the Times critic advised the AMM to carry on with the business of making fresh sounds and sound relationships and not to worry our musical heads about moral and social matters. We still share Cardew’s view that “if music was a purely aesthetic experience it wouldn’t occupy the central place in does in our affairs. It must make waves in the environment and have repercussions beyond the concert hall.”

Music can be, and often is, gloss or mere embellishment, its function to entertain and to pacify in a burgeoning culture industry; but it can also be much more, and much different: at its best improvised music is a commentary on society, or rather, on what it is like to live in that society. The test is the degree of authenticity of the commentary, the depth and psychological consequences of its impact on the audience, for the listener's role is not just message reception, but comparison for re-use.

If we, AMM, ask ourselves what we are doing; if we reflect on our music’s reception over the years as well as the significance it has for us, we discern that it seems to inhabit a metaphysical space and that it encroaches upon domains normally associated with religion and with religious faith in particular. Except that Art offers no pat answers, no miracles (as Religion does); nor does it offer solutions (as Ideologies do). Art demands commitment and sacrifice; it involves risk, but promises nothing. So that as atheists, as artists, the AMM in its music-making seeks to wrest the idea, and practice, of ‘spirituality’ from religion; ‘spirituality’ is not the private property of religion. We agree with Iris Murdoch that the word seems to be “at home in the moral (my italics) sphere, suggesting the creative, imaginative activity of our mind, spirit, in relation to our surroundings.”

What AMM seeks is transparency, that transparency that means doing without the argument altogether: a revelatory experience. And isn’t it the revelatory experience which all musicians in their heart of hearts aspire to? Yet the route is tortuous, fraught with adversities, and we forget this at our peril. “‘Truth’ is found by ‘truthful’ endeavour.....The world is not given to us ‘on a plate’, it is given to us as a creative task.” Murdoch. And in AMM’s musical endeavours this applies to players and listeners alike. In a world dominated by rampant ideologies, appearing in both materialistic and other-worldly guises, AMM has developed, through its music-making, a survival strategy: a new, creative mode of ‘self-invention’ which expresses and in some measure satisfies human needs but which cannot be ‘performed’ in a purely professional capacity.

In the 18th Brumaire Marx wrote: “The social revolution of the 19th century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.” The idealism and utopianism inherent in AMM music need not be an embarrassment; on the contrary, in its anticipation and imaginative expression of music-making in a new society - a peaceful, creative and collaborative future where people manage and determine their own lives - it can inspire and sustain us when, as it certainly will in the coming years, the going gets tough.

John Tilbury

AMM: Drummer Eddie Prevost, pianist John Tilbury, and guitarist Keith Rowe hit England’s pop charts a few years ago, even though their improvs are a model of Cagean purity, austerity, and attention to accidental sounds. Too rare a New York appearance to miss. May 3 at 9, Context Studios Performance Space, 28 Avenue A, 3rd Floor, at 3rd Street, 473-0043. (Gann)