A B R I G H T N O W H E R E
Journeying into Improvisation
Dir. Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz, UK, 2023
A new documentary about a remarkable series of concerts of improvised music at London’s Café OTO.
Filmed across four Saturday nights in July 2022 when over 30 musicians joined improviser, percussionist and animateur Eddie Prévost on stage for a residency marking his 80th birthday.
The film takes a candid look at improvisers who create music in the moment, free from the authority of a composer, score or conductor. The musicians focus entirely upon real-time collective exploration and as their music unfolds the cameras place us at the heart of the action with revealing yet unobtrusive intimacy.
Additional insights arise from interviews with a selection of the featured musicians including John Butcher, Ute Kanngiesser, Marjolaine Charbin, Nathan Moore, Alan Wilkinson, Sue Lynch, John Tilbury and Eddie Prévost himself. There is also a glimpse inside the weekly London improvisation workshop established by Prévost in 1999, and readings by musician and author David Toop.
The film reaches a compelling finale with a concert by AMM, the pioneering improvising group co-founded by Eddie Prévost in the mid-1960s. This was the group’s final performance – named Concert of the Year 2022 by Derek Walmsley in The Wire magazine – a combustible duet between Eddie Prévost and Keith Rowe incorporating samples of recordings by the group’s absent third member, John Tilbury.
A BRIGHT NOWHERE opens the door to a rich world of unorthodox sounds, inviting doubters to reappraise the music and handing existing devotees a valuable opportunity to commune with the art form they love. Improvisation - that unruly, irrepressible and vital music which persists, in the words of David Toop, “as anomaly, as conscience, as critique and as refuge.”
_____________________A BRIGHT NOWHERE: Journeying into Improvisation
Dir. Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz, UK, 2023, 100 mins
FILM PREMIERE
The Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High Street, Dalston E8 2PB
Sunday 9th July 2023, 6.00pm
£10 | www.riocinema.org.uk