Eddie Prevost's Workshop (Part 2: Modus operandi)

Friday April 2

So, here I was back at Eddie Prevost's weekly workshop for the second week in succession and the third time overall - enough to start to make me feel like a regular. As it was Good Friday, Eddie himself was away, leaving a gap to be filled. Guitarist Ross Lambert, a longtime workshop veteran and stalwart, ably stood in for Eddie, giving the all-important introductory talk and selecting the groupings to play together at the end. To help you make sense of that, maybe I should tell you a bit more about how the workshop operates...

Each week the workshop meets in the basement of a chapel on Southwark Bridge Road, within walking distance of Tate Modern. Typically, the workshop attracts between ten and twenty players, some of whom attend regularly, some occasionally, some once only. According to Eddie, the exact same group of players has never assembled twice. The players are seated in a ring, evenly spaced a comfortable distance apart. Those with equipment such as electronics or a short-wave radio will have a table in front of them. There is an upright piano in one corner of the room.

The brief introductory talk emphasises that the workshop is a safe space, a place to try out new ideas and to experiment. After it, the lights are dimmed to a comfortable level, and an adjacent pair of players (let's call them A and B) are chosen to start playing a duo. There is no set duration for a duo; it is at the discretion of the players themselves. When player A stops playing (often indicating so with a look or a nod to player C on the other side of B) C begins and the duo of B and C continues to play. And so on anticlockwise around the ring, C & D, D & E etc, ending up with N & A, bringing the duo full circle. By then, every player will have played in two duos, one with each of their immediate neighbours. The rest of the time they will have been sitting and listening. Depending on how many players attend, these opening duos altogether last up to an hour and three quarters.

The most noticeable thing about these opening duos is how truly experimental the players are, being uninhibited and unafraid to try things out. It is also remarkable how restrained they are, with the players in a duo not crowding each other, allowing each other space to play in and responding to each other's playing. Of course, there are occasional duos that are incompatible but they generally persist with peaceful co-existence and run on parallel tracks, often with surprisingly successful results. For myself, one effect of the restraint is that I have not yet cut loose and blown all out, something which seems true of other saxophone players there. Instead, I have opted for a quieter, more textural approach, which produces sounds more akin to electronics. This week, to emphasise this aspect of my playing - and to experiment - I opted to amplify my sax so as to hear the internal sounds of the horn. To do this, I inserted a microphone into the bell of the sax and also surrounded it with cloth in order to dampen down the sound coming out of the bell. When plugged into a small amplifier, the resulting sounds were quite unsaxlike.One of my duos was with electronics, and the two combined into a soundscape where the sax and electronics were at times indistinguishable. There is further scope for experimentation here; I may try and get hold of a cheap volume pedal soon. Electronics player Daichi Yoshikawa was not there tonight, as he was working at Cafe Oto. I am keen to hear how we work as a duo, and am looking forward to the two of us collaborating soon.

Anyway, after the opening duos are complete, whoever is leading then asks various larger groupings (often trios) to play together. The choices of personnel are based on what the leader has heard during the duos. This week, as there were fourteen of us present (and time was short because the duos went on quite a long time) Ross opted for two septets, plus a quartet and a trio. After the duos, it was a strange experience to play in a larger grouping - the larger the grouping, the stranger it feels. In the septet, I had to be very conscious not to hide or to underplay. In the quartet, I felt more exposed and was conscious again not to opt out or hide, which is easily done.

After everyone has packed away and paid their £3 subs (to pay for the hire of the hall), there is a tradition that all the players go to a local pub in order to chat and socialise. This aspect of the workshop is in keeping with the underlying ethos, which is supportive and communal with no emphasis on individual egos. For the next two Fridays, I cannot attend the workshop, having other commitments (gigs by Mats Gustafsson and by Humcrush). I am greatly looking forward to both of those, but already feel a sense of regret at missing the workshop. Yes, I am beginning to feel like a regular...