The Rowland Sutherland Sextet
Saturday 2nd April, 15:00
With their colourful, pulsating originals, the six world-class musicians of Rowland Sutherland’s sextet offer a blend of jazz, reggae, dub, funk, and African and Brazilian grooves.
Rowland Sutherland (flute). One of the UK’s most versatile flute players, Rowland has forged an international career embracing jazz, classical, non-Western and pop music. As well as playing in some of the UK’s leading orchestras and new music ensembles, he has established himself as a composer, completing commissions for Lontano, the Fidelio Trio, CoMA and the New Music Players, and has become widely acknowledged as one of the UK’s leading jazz flautists. Following an early association with the Jazz Warriors, including such fellow members as Orphy Robinson and Courtney Pine, he has gone on to perform with David Murray, Flora Purim, Frank Wess, Ali Ryerson and Jean Toussaint, among others. Rowland has also recorded for such artists and bands as George Benson, Incognito, Joss Stone and Fightstar in the pop world. He fronts several groups including Mistura (whose album Coast to Coast has been widely acclaimed). Creative Force and Myrtle (with Alwynne Pritchard and Thorolf Thuestad) alongside his sextet.
Phil Dawson (guitar) has crossed Africa working with such icons of Pan-African music as Hugh Masekela (South Africa), Tony Allen (Nigeria), Khaled (Algeria) and Baaba Maal (Senegal). He has performed or recorded with Michael Prophet, the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Ty, Johnny Clarke, Earl 16, Mad Professor, Sounds of Blackness, Junior Giscombe and Leee John. He also worked on the recent sell-out production of Fela! at the National Theatre. He performs regularly with London-based world fusion/roots bands Soothsayers, Dele Sosimi Afrobeat Orchestra, Saravah Soul and Creative Force. He has also collaborated with Brit-jazz artists Ben Davis (Basquiat), Orphy Robinson, Julia Biel and Tony Kofi. He has longstanding connections with Brazilian music, working with such artists as the Tropicalia-generation vocalist Adma Macedo Newport, Moreno+2, and Orquestra Imperial and Ed Motta producing music for the world-famous Companhia de Dança Deborah Colker.
Harry Brown (trombone). Brought up in London, he studied with Dudley Bright at the Royal Academy of Music, gaining a Master of Music degree in performance. A member of the original Jazz Warriors, he was part of the line-up reconvened by Courtney Pine for the band’s 2007 Afropeans concert, subsequently released as an album. He works regularly with the new Jazz Jamaica, Rowland Sutherland’s Creative Force, Jerry Dammers Spatial aka Orchestra and his own quartet featuring Robert Mitchell, Larry Bartley and Rod Youngs. He was made an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music in May 2010. His performance, studio and arranging credits include such international artists as Massive Attack, Adele, Tom Jones, Barry White and Joss Stone.
Nick Ramm (piano) studied at Blackheath Conservatoire, Keele University and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama before embarking on his career with Nick Ramm’s Quota. He has worked with some of the world’s most highly regarded musicians, including Sir Tom Jones, Jack Bruce (with the BBC Big Band), the Cinematic Orchestra, Seb Rochford, Barak Schmool and Matthew Herbert. A director of the F-IRE Collective, he led its sixteen-piece ensemble on a UK tour in 2008. He has performed widely with his own band Clown Revisited, whose first album, Flashes of a Normal World, was released in 2005. He currently works with Denys Baptiste, the Strange Pretty Things, Graham Hughes’s Sunshine Kings, Tom Skinner, Finn Peters and Jonny Phillips’s Oriole.
Dave O’Brien (bass) is in high demand as a double bassist and bass guitarist, and also as a pianist, notably with his own group Porpoise Corpus. He also plays jazz, rock, funk, m-base, samba and son-montuno with other groups in London, as well as fusions involving south Indian music, flamenco and cabaret. He has recently undertaken musical field trips to Cuba, the Gambia and New York, where he attended a course at the School for Improvised Music. He recently won a Peter Whittingham award to curate two nights at Pizza on the Park, both of which featured newly commissioned music from Porpoise Corpus, in collaboration with the film-makers/VJs Dandelion & Burdock.
Rod Youngs (drums) is a London-based musician, composer and educator. A native of Washington DC, where he studied with Fred Begun of the National Symphony Orchestra and gained a Bachelor of Music degree from Howard University, he went on to study jazz performance with Keith Copland at the Eastman School. He has performed or recorded with a formidable array of artists including Ronnie Laws, Hugh Masekela, Gil Scott-Heron, David Murray, Natalie Cole, Me’Shell NdegéOcello, Soweto Kinch, Matthew Herbert, Steve Williamson, Julian Joseph, Jhelisa Anderson, Courtney Pine, Vanessa Rubin, Sia, Juliet Roberts, Denys Baptiste, Gary Crosby’s Nu Troop and the Jazz Jamaica All Stars. He has taught on the University of Glamorgan jazz course, and conducts performance workshops throughout the UK for Tomorrow’s Warriors, Serious International Music Producers and the Round House.
