Fred Frith
Fred Frith ( born February 17, 1949 in Heathfield, East Sussex ) is a British composer, improviser, multi-instrumentalist (guitar, violin, bass guitar, Third Bridge guitar, piano, xylophone, vocals) and high school teachers.
Life and work
Frith began as part of a very musical family at the age of 5 years playing the violin; later to play the piano and the guitar at age 13 were added. As a teenager, he coverte beat music, but also blues rock. During his studies at Cambridge, the genre boundaries were too narrow for him: He enriched rock with classical, Eastern European and Asian music and was attracted by the play facilities on the guitar through various alienations from. With his fellow student, saxophonist Tim Hodgkinson, he founded in 1968, the art-rock band Henry Cow. After the dissolution of the band in 1979, he joined the Art Bears, but also played with such diverse avant-garde figures such as John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Brian Eno, Aki Takase, Ikue Mori, Louis Sclavis, Bob Ostertag, the free jazz musicians Peter Kowald, Sonny Sharrock and Peter Brötzmann or the folk-rock guitarist Richard Thompson. Frith founded as various formations like Massacre ( with Bill Laswell and Charles Hayward ) or Skeleton Crew ( with Tom Cora, Zeena Parkins and ). In addition, he collaborated with Robert Wyatt, Sally Potter, Half Japanese, Lindsay Cooper, The Residents, Amy Denio, Attwenger, Jean -Pierre Drouet, Evelyn Glennie, Heiner Goebbels and Yo- Yo Ma. He also produced albums for The Orthotonics, David Moss, Tenko and V -effect.
In addition to compositions for ballet, film and theater, he wrote for the Rova Saxophone Quartet, the ARTE Quartett, Ensemble Modern ( "Traffic Continues" ), the Arditti Quartet and the Dutch Asko Ensemble. He has worked as a university professor at Mills College in California, where he lives with photographer Heike Liss and their two children Finn and Lucia. The Swiss documentary filmmaker Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel dedicated to him the award-winning film " Step Across the Border" (1990).
Lexical entries
- Wolf Kampmann: Reclam Jazz Encyclopedia. Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-010528-5.