"Stephen Grew has been playing piano and electronic keyboards for 25 years. His music is completely improvised. He creates spontaneous compositions with other musicians in the heat of the moment. He also performs as a soloist. He is based in Lancaster, UK, and has toured extensively, touring and recording with many musicians from the free improvised scene here in Britain and abroad. Performing in Grutronic, a four piece electronic band, and Grew Trio, Grew Quartet and Grew & Grew. He has also performed with Evan Parker, Keith Tippett, Graham Clark, Pat Thomas, Howard Riley and many others. Long standing collaborators are his brother, Nicholas Grew, Richard Scott, David Ross and Philip Marks.

"I have devote all of my energies to making music, completely made in the moment, improvised. I play with some great musicians, Gulliver Maxwell an alto saxophone player and other Lancastrian players. My first band was with Steve Lewis and George McKay (Charivari) in 1995. I have toured consistently since 1996, in Grew Trio with the great Mancunian players, drummer Phillip Marks and sax/electronics player Richard Scott who I met through Steve Lewis in 1995. We have mainly performed in Britain but also performed in prestigious Modern music festivals in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Latvia and Canada. In 2000 Richard Scott left Grew trio and after a duo collaboration with Sheffield based sax/bassoon player Mick Beck, Mick joined Grew trio to form Grew Quartet in 2006, with Oxford based bass player Dominic Lash. At times I have had to work as a shop keeper, assembler of golf trolleys, gardener and fisherman. My current work takes me to working in Grutronic, (Myspace.com/grutronicmusic) with guests Evan Parker, Orphy Robinson, Paul Obermayer and Grew quartet, a recent Orchestral project with Nicholas Grew and duos featuring violinist Graham Clark, drummer Tony Bianco, Phillip Marks, and drummer / electronics musician David Ross all of whom are based outside of Lancaster. Our music comes out of a need to play music and communicate with sound at the moments of creating it, this process becomes very refined over many years. The long periods of time devoting the workman like instrumentalists approach to making this kind of music, creates a greater clarity of playing and composing, until a bit of magic conversation appears!"-Stephen Grew"

"Dr. Richard Scott is a UK-born Berlin-based composer and free improvising musician working with analogue modular synthesizers and alternative controllers such as his own self-designed WiGi infra red controller developed at STEIM, the Buchla Thunder and Buchla Lightning. He has been composing and performing improvised music for over 25 years, recently performing and recording with artists such as Evan Parker, Shelley Hirsch, Sidsel Endreson, Twinkle³, Richard Barrett, Axel Doerner, Jon Rose, Clive Bell, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Emilio Gordoa, Thomas Lehn, Frank Gratkowski, Michael Vorfeld, Ute Wassermann, Phil Marks, David Birchall, David Ross, Bark! and Grutronic amongst many others.

He studied improvisation with John Stevens, saxophone with Elton Dean and Steve Lacy, Action Theater improvisation with Sten Rudstrom and electroacoustic composition with David Berezan and Ricardo Climent.

His work has been featured on BBC Radio 3 and 4, International Computer Music Conference (Athens and Huddersfield) London Jazz Festival, BEAM, Bratislava NEXT Festival of Advanced Music, Konfrontationen, Austria, SARC Sonorities Belfast, International Festival for Artistic Innovation, Leeds, Berlin Interaktion Improvised Music Festival and MANTIS Electroacoustic Music Festival, Manchester. He was a long term artistic resident at STEIM in Amsterdam, sometimes a Lecturer and visiting professor at various Universities and co-curator of two important long-running "underground" concert series in Berlin: AUXXX Berlin and Basic Electricity.

In 1993 he was awarded a PhD from London University for his thesis on free improvisation. In 2010 he completed a MusM (distinction) in Electroacoustic Music Composition at NOVARS, Manchester University. He wrote extensively for Wire magazine, was administrator at the LMC (London Musician's Collective) and has been an active member of the improvising and electroacoustic communities in London, Manchester and Berlin."

"David Ross was born in 1967 in East London and lived and worked there until moving to rural Norfolk in 2016. He is a restless and eccentric artist who touches every instrument with his own unpredictable and disorientating sound. David is a maker of bizarre electronics such as The Davestation, The Drosscilator, and is reportedly the only musician to have composed an album entirely using an analogue synthesizer built into a kettle. Alongside these devises, he also plays more conventional instruments such as Jew's Harp, Drums, Kalimba and Kantele. He drummed in the 90s cult band Kenny Process Team and is currently a member of Twinkle3."

"Evan Parker was born in Bristol in 1944 and began to play the saxophone at the age of 14. Initially he played alto and was an admirer of Paul Desmond; by 1960 he had switched to tenor and soprano, following the example of John Coltrane, a major influence who, he would later say, determined "my choice of everything". In 1962 he went to Birmingham University to study botany but a trip to New York, where he heard the Cecil Taylor trio (with Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray), prompted a change of mind. What he heard was "music of a strength and intensity to mark me for life ... l came back with my academic ambitions in tatters and a desperate dream of a life playing that kind of music - 'free jazz' they called it then."

Parker stayed in Birmingham for a time, often playing with pianist Howard Riley. In 1966 he moved to London, became a frequent visitor to the Little Theatre Club, centre of the city's emerging free jazz scene, and was soon invited by drummer John Stevens to join the innovative Spontaneous Music Ensemble which was experimenting with new kinds of group improvisation. Parker's first issued recording was SME's 1968 Karyobin, with a line-up of Parker, Stevens, Derek Bailey, Dave Holland and Kenny Wheeler. Parker remained in SME through various fluctuating line-ups - at one point it comprised a duo of Stevens and himself - but the late 1960s also saw him involved in a number of other fruitful associations.

He began a long-standing partnership with guitarist Bailey, with whom he formed the Music Improvisation Company and, in 1970, co-founded Incus Records. (Tony Oxley, in whose sextet Parker was then playing, was a third co-founder; Parker left Incus in the mid-1980s.) Another important connection was with the bassist Peter Kowald who introduced Parker to the German free jazz scene. This led to him playing on Peter Brötzmann's 1968 Machine Gun, Manfred Schoof's 1969 European Echoes and, in 1970, joining pianist Alex von Schlippenbach and percussionist Paul Lovens in the former's trio, of which he is still a member: their recordings include Pakistani Pomade, Three Nails Left, Detto Fra Di Noi, Elf Bagatellen and Physics.

Parker pursued other European links, too, playing in the Pierre Favre Quartet (with Kowald and Swiss pianist Irene Schweizer) and in the Dutch Instant Composers Pool of Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink. The different approaches to free jazz he encountered proved both a challenging and a rewarding experience. He later recalled that the German musicians favoured a "robust, energy-based thing, not to do with delicacy or detailed listening but to do with a kind of spirit-raising, a shamanistic intensity. And l had to find a way of surviving in the heat of that atmosphere ... But after a while those contexts became more interchangeable and more people were involved in the interactions, so all kinds of hybrid musics came out, all kinds of combinations of styles."

A vital catalyst for these interactions were the large ensembles in which Parker participated in the 1970s: Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO) and occasional big bands led by Kenny Wheeler. In the late 70s Parker also worked for a time in Wheeler's small group, recording Around Six and, in 1980, he formed his own trio with Guy and LJCO percussionist Paul Lytton (with whom he had already been working in a duo for nearly a decade). This group, together with the Schlippenbach trio, remains one of Parker's top musical priorities: their recordings include Tracks, Atlanta, Imaginary Values, Breaths and Heartbeats, The Redwood Sessions and At the Vortex. In 1980, Parker directed an Improvisers Symposium in Pisa and, in 1981, he organised a special project at London's Actual Festival. By the end of the 1980s he had played in most European countries and had made various tours to the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. ln 1990, following the death of Chris McGregor, he was instrumental in organising various tributes to the pianist and his fellow Blue Notes; these included two discs by the Dedication Orchestra, Spirits Rejoice and lxesa.

Though he has worked extensively in both large and small ensembles, Parker is perhaps best known for his solo soprano saxophone music, a singular body of work that in recent years has centred around his continuing exploration of techniques such as circular breathing, split tonguing, overblowing, multiphonics and cross-pattern fingering. These are technical devices, yet Parker's use of them is, he says, less analytical than intuitive; he has likened performing his solo work to entering a kind of trance-state. The resulting music is certainly hypnotic, an uninterrupted flow of snaky, densely-textured sound that Parker has described as "the illusion of polyphony". Many listeners have indeed found it hard to credit that one man can create such intricate, complex music in real time. Parker's first solo recordings, made in 1974, were reissued on the Saxophone Solos CD in 1995; more recent examples are Conic Sections and Process and Reality, on the latter of which he does, for the first time, experiment with multi-tracking. Heard alone on stage, few would disagree with writer Steve Lake that "There is, still, nothing else in music - jazz or otherwise - that remotely resembles an Evan Parker solo concert."

While free improvisation has been Parker's main area of activity over the last three decades, he has also found time for other musical pursuits: he has played in 'popular' contexts with Annette Peacock, Scott Walker and the Charlie Watts big band; he has performed notated pieces by Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman and Frederic Rzewski; he has written knowledgeably about various ethnic musics in Resonance magazine. A relatively new field of interest for Parker is improvising with live electronics, a dialogue he first documented on the 1990 Hall of Mirrors CD with Walter Prati. Later experiments with electronics in the context of larger ensembles have included the Synergetics - Phonomanie III project at Ullrichsberg in 1993 and concerts by the new EP2 (Evan Parker Electronic Project) in Berlin, Nancy and at the 1995 Stockholm Electronic Music Festival where Parker's regular trio improvised with real-time electronics processed by Prati, Marco Vecchi and Phillip Wachsmann. "Each of the acoustic instrumentalists has an electronic 'shadow' who tracks him and feeds a modified version of his output back to the real-time flow of the music."

The late 80s and 90s brought Parker the chance to play with some of his early heroes. He worked with Cecil Taylor in small and large groups, played with Coltrane percussionist Rashied Ali, recorded with Paul Bley: he also played a solo set as support to Ornette Coleman when Skies of America received its UK premiere in 1988. The same period found Parker renewing his acquaintance with American colleagues such as Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy and George Lewis, with all of whom he had played in the 1970s (often in the context of London's Company festivals). His 1993 duo concert with Braxton moved John Fordham in The Guardian to raptures over "saxophone improvisation of an intensity, virtuosity, drama and balance to tax the memory for comparison".

Parker's 50th birthday in 1994 brought celebratory concerts in several cities, including London, New York and Chicago. The London performance, featuring the Parker and Schlippenbach trios, was issued on a highly-acclaimed two-CD set, while participants at the American concerts included various old friends as well as more recent collaborators in Borah Bergman and Joe Lovano. The NYC radio station WKCR marked the occasion by playing five days of Parker recordings. 1994 also saw the publication of the Evan Parker Discography, compiled by ltalian writer Francesco Martinelli, plus chapters on Parker in books on contemporary musics by John Corbett and Graham Lock.

Parker's future plans involve exploring further possibilities in electronics and the development of his solo music. They also depend to a large degree on continuity of the trios, of the large ensembles, of his more occasional yet still long-standing associations with that pool of musicians to whose work he remains attracted. This attraction, he explained to Coda's Laurence Svirchev, is attributable to "the personal quality of an individual voice". The players to whom he is drawn "have a language which is coherent, that is, you know who the participants are. At the same time, their language is flexible enough that they can make sense of playing with each other ... l like people who can do that, who have an intensity of purpose." "