Week of Surprise: NOW MY LIFE IS SWEET LIKE CINNAMON // Pat Thomas

A Week of Surprise full of musical surprises, diversions, oases and discoveries. Due to the current Corona situation, the Cologne festival "Night of Surprise", will take place as a six-day festival, including not only the Stadtgarten but also other concert venues such as the Christuskirche and the Galerie Martina Kaiser. The program of this interim format focuses on niches of the European musical landscape and projects of some darlings of the last festival editions, on local projects and new collaborations in more concert-like formats.

NOW MY LIFE IS SWEET LIKE CINNAMON
Experimental Music Performance
"Transmedial, metachronotopian worldbuilding with neurotic vehemence" - and that is by no means all, but only the tip of the refreshing programmatic of "NOW MY LIFE IS SWEET LIKE CINNAMON". The musicians alternately refer to themselves as an idea, a game, a conglomerate, a factory or a band, as "a self-creating, interdisciplinary space, a constantly expanding cosmos, a growing organism with a sense of the absurd". Their most recent program, "America," is a collage-like exploration of various aspects of American (pop) culture and includes baseball organs, punk music, an alien invasion, two garbage cans, and three funky slap bass passages. Unbridled experimentation between electronic, free, indie, improvisation, noise and performance.

Pat Thomas Electro-Acoustic Improv: "For Lee Perry" & Hadra" (World Premiere)
Deconstruction, reconstruction, free power play. British pianist Pat Thomas' highly original and energetic style draws equally on Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and the radical innovations of free jazz and new improvised music. Long known primarily as a sideman of luminaries such as Derek Bailey and Lol Coxhill, Thomas is currently causing a new sensation with the quartet Ahmed. The London-based "improvising supergroup" (Wire) with Seymour Wright (sax), Joel Grip (bass) and Antonin Gerbal (drums) is following in the footsteps of the American jazz bassist and world music pioneer Ahmed Abdul-Malik in developing a rugged, rhythmic-conceptual music that is being enthusiastically celebrated by the critics. His Cologne solo concert will feature two new compositions for piano and electronics from Lockdown for the first time: "Hadra" and "For Lee Perry".