If you’re a subscriber to the Beats & Pieces mailing list you’ll already have heard about this from the latest newsletter but if not, I hope you’ll be as excited as we are about our upcoming tour dates all over England and Wales! Dates as they stand are as follows:

Friday 21st May – The Forge, Camden (info & tickets)

Saturday 5th June – Groove on the Green, Liverpool (info)

Tuesday 8th June – Dempseys, Cardiff (info)

Wednesday 9th June – Jazzland, Swansea (info & tickets)

Thursday 1st July – Bridgewater Hall (bar), Manchester (free gig after RNCM Symphony Orchestra perform music by Jonny Greenwood & Stravinsky – info)

Saturday 10th July – Marlborough Jazz Festival (info & tickets)

For more information check out the individual venue websites as listed below or the gigs page. You can also join the facebook group for the tour here.

We’ll also be playing with the Jo McCallum & Alice Zawadski Orchestra at a secret venue in Manchester on Thursday 20th May… Location to be revealed a few days before on this site, twitter, myspace and facebook – keep those eyes peeled!

It’d be awesome to see you down the front at one (or more…) of the dates, do come and say hi! We’re all well excited and counting down the days, not long now…

p.s. thanks again to the amazing Angela Guyton for letting us use her artwork again for the poster!

4/02/10 The Spin Off, Bar Santiago, Leeds

21/05/10 The Forge Venue, Camden

We’ll also be playing at the Marlborough Jazz Festival over the weekend of the 9th July – exact day to be confirmed but should be a good one!

When I first saw this video I thought it was a bit underwhelming, it just seemed a bit pointless to me to have whats essentially a glorified MIDI controlled sound module and not use it to its full advantage… The player piano works of people like Conlon Nancarrow that Metheny talks about on his website were composed and developed because at the time humans weren’t considered physically and/or mentally capable of accurately realising their music due to the complex, often mathematical rhythms, or massive chords far beyond the capabilities of ten human fingers – at least in that preview video, there didn’t appear to be anything in that vein that humans couldn’t do? So I was a bit puzzled as to the musical point of the project, the technical point of the project obviously being the super geek coolness of programming and controlling hundreds of robotic arms.

But then I read this article in the Guardian that talks about Pat controlling everything in real time by sending MIDI messages through Ableton Live, and suddenly everything became a lot cooler… As far as I understand it, the plan is to be able to control the ensemble in such a way that he can improvise with himself each night – sounds like a technical nightmare and frankly a bit of a bitch for one man to control live on stage, but if he can pull it off its going to be amazing; musically, technically and visually. I’d love to go but at present the only tickets left for the Barbican gig are £65… Time to scour eBay I think.

(Incidentally, looking at the tour schedule on Metheny’s website, does anyone else find it disappointing that there’s loads of dates inside certain countries but still only one in the UK? Obviously this is not a fault of Metheny or his people but it seems quite common to me that people only play in London when they’re doing European tours and its a shame there isn’t enough of a demand amongst audiences and/or promoters to make gigs outside London commercially viable…)