Part two of Fred Frith’s two-night run at Roulette for the final events in his 75th birthday celebrations.

Normal is Fred Frith and Sudhu Tewari, playing manually & electronically manipulated  home-made instruments. They’re not really instruments in the sense of beautifully crafted art objects requiring Extended Techniques, so much as de-constructions and reconstructions using the simplest of means. Fred’s “planks of wood with strings”  were almost all built in the early 1980s, when for a period of several years he abandoned the guitar as his primary vehicle for improvising. The birth of this duo in 2001 marked the first time he had performed with them in many years. The fact that  he is doing so again is the responsibility of Tewari, a tinkerer of genius who plunders  garages and junkshops and the street outside for the sources of his sound world,  turning the smallest spring into a potential orchestra. In 2020 Tewari and Frith were invited to present their work in a virtual exhibition at the Center for New Music in San Francisco. This performance gave rise to a number of new creations including the Portable Street Piano, the Post Hole Tone Music Box, the No Strings Guitar, Sudhu’s Infernal Spring Thing, and the Superstrut Bandsaw Bass. The first Normal CD—Moving Parts—was  released on fo’c’sle in May 2023. Normal is joined on this occasion by Fred’s long-time collaborator and friend, Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker—a key figure in European improvisation and experimental music.

“Fred the magician? A little for sure, and also very adept at bringing together cultures and languages in a process of collective creativity. That’s already a lot!” – Jazz Magazine

Fred Frith guitar
Lotte Anker saxophones
Sudhu Tewari manually & electronically manipulated home-made instruments.

Fred Frith is a pioneer of the extended electric guitar. He learned to compose in Henry Cow, developed his song-writing skills in Art Bears, explored his multi instrumentalism in Skeleton Crew, rocked the house with Massacre, and is still doing  all of those things, having been in one band or another continuously since 1964! Meanwhile his work has been performed by ensembles, string quartets, chamber orchestras, and a whole range of groups and artists in the ever-expanding field of semi-popular music. Fred also composes extensively for film and dance, and taught improvisation for years at Mills College in Oakland, California and the Musik Akademie in Basel, Switzerland. His passion for improvising, evident from the beginning, has increasingly led him to work with artists who don’t necessarily define themselves as “improvisers.

Lotte Anker is a Copenhagen-based saxophone player and composer working in the field of experimental jazz/improvisation and contemporary music. Her work includes both melodic (often twisted or fragmented) elements and more abstract textural material, and covers a wide range of territories from minimal transparency to dense and dark expressionism. Lotte has been initiator and bandleader of a number of highly acclaimed collaborations and groups with  musicians such as Craig Taborn, Gerald Cleaver, Sylvie Courvoisier, Ikue Mori,  Phil Minton and Garth Knox, to name a few. She has performed world-wide at  major festivals and concert spaces, touring with Tim Berne, Marilyn Crispell,  Andrew Cyrille, Peter Friis-Nielsen, Fred Frith, Joëlle Léandre, Okkyung Lee, Fred  Lonberg-Holm, Paal Nilssen-Love, Herb Robertson, Sten Sandell, Raymond Strid and many others. Her compositional work includes music for both small groups and  large ensembles in both contemporary new music and modern/experimental jazz  worlds and combinations of both.

Sudhu Tewari has been described as “bricoleur,” “junkyard maven,” and “audio gadgeteer.” He invents, designs and builds musical instruments from whatever materials are at hand—kinetic and sound sculptures, interactive installations, audio electronics, and wearable sound art. He has performed with Normal and in other configurations in Europe, Japan and the USA. His visual and interactive art has been exhibited in spaces large and small, including the Exploratorium and the Museum of  Modern Art in San Francisco, the Tech Museum in San Jose, the Oakland Museum of  California, and PROGR and the Laboratoire Village Nomade in Switzerland. Tewari teaches electronics and sound art, and continues to build and perform with self governing musical systems and self-built musical instruments. Relentless curiosity  and delight in unlikely solutions to intractable problems are manifest in all of his work.