Matthew Berrill (Ireland) – clarinets
Andrew Oliver (US/UK) – piano
Simon Roth (UK) – drums
creative, friendly, quiet, and spontaneous music…
Hailing from Ireland, UK and the US, this new trio play a collection of self-penned and contemporary pieces that celebrate diversity, global musics, and spontaneity. The trio is built on long-lasting friendships between the band members formed at jazz workshops in Canada and and strengthened in the jazz communities of the UK and Ireland. The music is inspired and informed by a mutual love of the outdoors, philosophizing, cooking, and a wide variety of jazz and world music styles ranging from 90’s French jazz to free improvisation and folk music from Russia, west Africa and eastern Europe.
The trio has performed at the Vortex in London, the acclaimed Kaleidoscope night in Dublin, and around Ireland in 2016.
MATTHEW BERRILL (clarinets) -Matthew Berrill hails from Headford, County Galway, in the West of Ireland, growing up with a rich musical education and learning various styles of music from his parents. He graduated with a Masters Degree in Music Performance in May 2010, where he specialised in jazz saxophone, clarinet and composition, studying with John Ruocco at the Royal Conservatoire, Den Haag, The Netherlands. He has played on many stages in Europe including the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland, Avignon Jazz Festival in France and throughout his home country of Ireland. At the age of 18, he won the Senior Clarinet Competition in the Feis Ceoil in Dublin. He was awarded a place in the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music in Canada in 2007 and 2009. As well as being Artistic Director of the Galway Jazz Festival, Matthew is a member of many ensembles including Ensemble Ériu, who received a ‘Musical Collaboration Award’ at the Gradam TG4 awards in February 2015 and the Irish Memory Orchestra who performed in the Sori Festival, Jeonju, South Korea in October.
SIMON ROTH (drums) – I was introduced to music at a very young age through my mother’s big band, and these early musical experiences gave me an innate understanding of the importance of community through art. I also played music extensively with my two brothers, and I now know that a lot of the music we played would have been described as free improvisation. This was some of the first music I ever heard or played, and I feel like my life has been a constant search for joyous freedom within structure. I gained a first class honours degree in music from the University of York (2006-9), where I delved into the music of Béla Bartók, György Ligeti and Igor Stravinsky. I also studied Composition, Electroacoustic music, Indian music and Contemporary Jazz. In 2005 I studied at Newpark Music Centre in Dublin, Ireland. In 2007 I studied music pedagogy at the Kodály Institute in Kecskemét, Hungary and in 2010 I learnt Carnatic (South Indian Classical) Music at Brhaddhvani in Chennai, India. I have always been proactive in organising concerts and events, and founded and ran the cross-arts platform Pop-Up Circus from 2011 to 2014 – staging exhibitions and live events throughout London, from living rooms to steel workshops, galleries and arts centres. Pop-Up Circus was described by the Guardian as “a heartening impression of the quixotic, optimistic and generously shared energies of London’s young artistic community”. The events that I curated were conceived as hubs to instigate social change through the process of collaboration, improvisation and experimentation. As a composer, my music has been performed at the BBC Proms and broadcast widely on national radio. I am heavily involved with the Elliot Galvin Trio, which received the Young European Jazz Artist of the Year Award 2014 at Burghausen Jazz Festival. In Summer 2014 we also received the Help Musicians UK Development Award for ‘Dreamland’ – a multimedia installation at Turner Contemporary. Recent highlights for the trio include supporting Robert Glasper Trio at Ronnie Scott’s International Piano Trio Festival, Jools Holland at Greenwich Music Time, and playing The Arena at Love Supreme Festival. Our second album ‘Punch’ is being released through Edition Records this summer. I have toured the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada and Asia and played prestigious venues and festivals across the world, with highlights including Cheltenham Festival, Burghausen Jazz Festival, 12 Points!, Songlines Encounters Festival, The BBC Proms, Kleztival Sao Paulo, Happy Days International Beckett Festival and Love Supreme Jazz Festival. I have appeared on several critically acclaimed albums, with the recently released Engines Orchestra album ‘Lifecycles’ and Elliot Galvin Trio’s ‘Dreamland’ receiving four star reviews from All About Jazz, Jazzwise and The Guardian.
ANDREW OLIVER (piano) – Andrew Oliver is an American pianist based in London specializing in early jazz, swing, tango, and modern jazz piano. He studied in New Orleans before returning to his hometown of Portland, Oregon in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. After traveling to Africa with saxophonist Devin Phillips in 2007 as part of the U.S. State Department’s “Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad” program, Andrew founded The Kora Band, blending West African traditions and jazz and featuring Kane Mathis on kora, a 21-string traditional harp. Andrew was awarded a 2012 New Jazz Works grant from Chamber Music America for the composition, performance, and recording of “New Cities”, the third Kora Band album, released to critical acclaim in 2015 on Whirlwind Recordings. Andrew received a scholarship to study at the renowned Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music in 2009. While there, Andrew and 5 other musicians from the U.S. and Canada co-founded the group Tunnel Six, which has since toured Canada and the U.S. seven times with support from the Canada Council for the Arts. The title track of their debut album “Lake Superior”, a composition of Andrew’s, was awarded a 2010 ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Award. Andrew was the co-founder and former executive director of the Portland Jazz Composers’ Ensemble, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Oregon which works to encourage the creation and dissemination of jazz and creative music in the region. In 2013, the PJCE instituted a new record label, PJCE Records, releasing a wide variety of creative music from Portland artists, including “Sister Cities” from his group The Ocular Concern, which was released to critical acclaim, including a 4-star Downbeat review, in 2014. Andrew has been active in traditional jazz since high school, and ince moving to London, he has become an integral member of the city’s thriving traditional jazz scene, co-directing The Dime Notes, the Vitality Five, the Vitality Three, and performing with the Old Hat Jazz Band and others, endeavoring to perform stride piano and early jazz and swing with the true energetic and revolutionary spirit that it embodies. Andrew also has a passion for Argentine tango music, having collaborated for many years with Portland tango musician and dancer Alex Krebs on a number of projects and albums of traditional, contemporary, and original tango music. He works with singer Megan Yvonne in a duo setting and performs regularly with the London Tango Orchestra.
Andrew Oliver 