History
The SME began an intensive 6 nights per week residency at the Little Theatre Club in London in January 1966 and recorded their first album Challenge the following month.
One can loosely divide the group's history into two periods: the more horn-oriented earlier ensembles (typically with some combination of Watts, saxophonist Evan Parker and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler), and the later string-based ensembles with guitarist Roger Smith (who became as central to the second edition of SME as Watts was to the first) and violinist Nigel Coombes. (The transitional point is the quartet album Biosystem (Incus, 1977), which also featured cellist Colin Wood.)
Countless other musicians passed through the SME over the years, including Derek Bailey, Paul Rutherford, Maggie Nichols, Dave Holland, Barry Guy, Peter Kowald and Kent Carter. The final edition of the group was a trio of Stevens, Smith, and the saxophonist John Butcher, a configuration documented on A New Distance (1994).
Inspired both by American free jazz and by the radical, abstract music of AMM, as well as influences as diverse as Anton Webern and Samuel Beckett (two Stevens touchstones), the SME kept at least a measure of jazz in their sound, though this became less audible in the later "string" ensembles.
Stevens' death in 1994 brought an end to the SME.
Read more about this topic: Spontaneous Music Ensemble
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The principle office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–117)
“When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.”
—Erma Brombeck (20th century)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)