Cornelius Cardew remembered

3:28pm Wednesday 2nd July 2008

THE AVANT-garde will come to Waltham Forest this summer as a new event is added to the Leytonstone Festival line-up.

Event organiser and member of the Improvising Clarinet Ensemble (I-C-E) Noel Taylor hopes to bring something out of the ordinary to the festival.

"I had this idea for the Cornelius Cardew evening the year before and I just missed out on getting it into that programme," says Taylor, of Woodriffe Road, Leytonstone.

"I suppose I'm hoping it might be something we can make an annual event.

"It would be really lovely to get local people down as well as the sort of people who regularly go to this sort of event."

Born of his involvement with Eddie Prévost, who will also be performing at the event, Taylor's interest in Cardew was sparked only three years ago but has grown steadily since then.

"For about three years now, I've been going to a workshop run by Eddie Prévost on Friday evenings," says Taylor, 58, a technician at the University of Hertfordshire.

"That's the route through to this event for me personally."

Prévost, a percussionist who worked with Cardew in free improvisation group AMM during the 1960s, will play the tamtam at the event and will be joined by musical luminaries Steve Beresford and John Butcher.

"Steve uses toys and small electronics to generate his music," Taylor says.

"That will be the only thing that has some amplification - the rest of the evening will be acoustic.

Through Prévost's workshop, Taylor met fellow Cardew enthusiasts and it was thus that the concept for the evening at the festival came into being.

"I'm really looking forward to it - I think it will be an exciting evening," he says.

"I'm looking forward to seeing what Eddie Prévost and John Butcher come up with."

And the evening certainly promises to provide something outside the musical mainstream as the I-C-E plan to team up with dancer Geoff Unkovich to perform an interpretation of Cardew's Treatise - also famously covered by experimental rockers Sonic Youth.

"We're excited to be working with a dancer - that's a new venture," Taylor says.

"I contacted Geoff who is a dance therapist, and she immediately suggested that he might be really interested in this."

But doing the composition justice is no small task, as the score is made up of nearly 200 pages of lines, symbols and abstract shapes.

"People say you can play it however you like but we came to the conclusion that it would be better to use it as a loose interpretation," he explains.

The Cornelius Cardew evening is on July 7 at O'Neill's Pub, Leytonstone High Road, from 8pm. Entry is £3. See the website in related links for details.

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