"[...] On this night, those musicians were a combination of older and more recent attendees to the workshop: collectively, Mark Browne (saxophone), Ross Lambert (guitar), Emmanuelle Waeckerlé (voice), Iris Ederer (voice), Chris Hill (clarinet), Tom Mills (theremin), Mirei Yazawa (trumpet), James O' Sullivan (guitar), James Malone (electronics), Keisuke Matsui (cello), Daniel Kordik (electronics), Ed Lucas (trombone), Gerry Gold (trumpet), Jamie Coleman (trumpet), and Tom Wheatley (bass). The evening was divided into two halves: the first featured seven players, the second eight.

The format makes it harder to give a capsule review: what matters, above all, is process. But some moments still spring to mind: Emmanuelle Waeckerlé singing "Eddie, Eddie" in duet with Iris Ederer; Kesuke Matsui, who'd rigged his cello up to a feedbacking amp, scraping over the strings with what looked like an oyster card; a passage for trumpets (Mirei Yazawa, Gerry Gold) and trombone (Ed Lucas) plumbing the depths. At the same time, a series of highlights is beside the point. The workshop is not a preparation for something else; is not rehearsal, practice, or woodshedding, the preliminary to a main event. Instead, it is a space — or, more accurately, an activity — conducted for itself, with no end goal in mind; practice, practising, not as rehearsal, but as doing, enacting, carrying out. And the most compelling moments of this workshop performance were not the most performative, the most gig-like, but precisely those awkward, quiet or anti-performative moments that the workshop facilitates: the virtues of listening, the practice of being together, for no sake other than itself — everything that moment encompasses and that, within that moment, reaches beyond it, compressed, expanded, and set free. [...]"-David Grundy, Point of Departure

"Eddie Prévost turned eighty in June 2022 and to celebrate, Café Oto invited Prévost to convene four separate concerts, held every Saturday of July. Prévost named the residency for a line from Seamus Heaney's "Clearances" — "its heft and hush become a bright nowhere" — which he took as a model for the kinds of utopia modelled in musical improvisation; the series was further dedicated to the late impresario Victor Schonfield, who died early in May. As curator of the Music Now charity in the '60s, Schonfield played a key role in bringing American jazz and free jazz musicians from Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra to Miles Davis to the UK. He also served as part-time manager for AMM, the group with which Prévost over the years has been most indelibly associated — to the extent that Schonfield was jokingly referred to as a member of the group. In the '70s and '80s, Schonfield was active in left politics as chief trade union organiser and treasurer of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy: in his biography of Michael Foot, Mervyn Jones writes of Schonfield, Vladimir Derer and Jon Lansmann, later founder of Momentum, "they were unreservedly dedicated, they had no political ambitions of their own and they were in a position to work day and night for the cause without pay." And though, during this time, Schonfield's activities as a promoter had taken a back seat, in later years, he was a regular at Oto and a mentor to younger musicians.

The dedication to Schonfield highlighted the importance of those who, though not themselves musicians, are indispensable in facilitating and enabling the music and the culture it creates. It also harked back to that moment in the mid-'60s of a counter-cultural London, where musicians of working-class backgrounds like Prévost and Keith Rowe were able to some sort of lead in reinventing what music might be, even as that music has tended to fly under the radar of national and international cultural institutions. All those decades on, the series, with Prévost himself in the role of curator and organiser that Schonfield occupied, manifested a continuing dedication to improvised music as collective, social endeavour. Its generational sweep reflected the various stages and facets of Prévost's career and his firmly collaborative ethos, both centring and moving beyond his own individual role. As a music that is about collaboration, removing the format of the solo for an entirely collective music, free improvisation does not naturally lend itself to narratives of heroic, solitary genius, though sometimes those narratives inflect the way its history has been passed down to us. For Prévost, however, the approach to — or enabled by — improvisation, first discovered in AMM, and later expanded in his various theoretical books on improvisation, insists on the collective dimension first and foremost. As he wrote in the liner notes for the CD reissue of AMMMusic, "A preoccupation with ... with one's own ego at the expense of the ensemble is destructive."

Over the course of Bright Nowhere, watching each event unfold in its difference was watching process at work: not just a historical assembly, a chronological survey, or a potpourri, but a manifestation of the simultaneous openness and focus that can still be found in freely improvised music nearly sixty years since Prévost first began playing it. The figure of travel that Prévost added to Heaney's phrase — "marking a journey to a bright nowhere" — might suggest progression towards a goal, but-as in the fascination with notions of wandering, errancy, and travelling in Luigi Nono's late work — it instead complicates these ideas, blurring borders and boundaries, while refusing to give up on the hopes for better — political, social, human — brought to bear on aesthetic experimentation."-David Grundy, Point of Departure

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