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Free Improvisation Free Jazz Electroacoustic Improvisation Non-Idiomatic Improvisation

Philip Gibbs

British born Composer and Guitarist Philip Gibbs is one of the most interesting and original voices on the contemporary jazz and impro scene today.

Philip Gibbs has produced a series of groundbreaking recordings as composer and guitar soloist, and played on over forty with heavyweight jazz groups including a cast of internationally recognised players - William Parker, Paul Dunmall, John Serry, Roy Cambell, Keith Tippett, Hamid Drake, Markus Stockhausen, Paul Rogers, and many others.

His approach to guitar performance includes many new extended techniques and preparations, which he has explored much further than any other guitarist alive today. He has been described in recent reviews as a master of six or seven performance styles, and regularly receives excellent critical notices from downtown New York, which some regard as the toughest place to 'make your mark'.

Philip Gibbs is self-taught, starting to study and emulate his guitar heroes - Hendrix, McLaughlin, etc. - at an early age; he explored jazz and world music traditions in his teens, while playing with black soul and funk bands, and was already developing his own signature rhythm and lead sounds back in the '70s. Over the next three decades, his voice on the guitar has constantly developed, through a single-minded, dedicated process of refinement, to what it is today - a nightmarish stew of unholy remnants and bizarre honks and squeals, or otherwise, a multifaceted, unique sound world, equally potent in free-form jazz as in contemporary impro, electronic music, 'sonic art', and electric 'new jazz' groups.

Philip Gibbs' work has ranged from the wholly composed to the freely improvised, and all points between. His new solo recording 'Thoughts and Feelings' showcases an artist at the height of his powers, and contains compositions and performances as radical and different from other guitar works, as for example Harmolodics was to be-bop, or Jackson Pollack's 'Summer' was to representational painting.

Philip Gibbs biography originally written by Benjamin D. Williams (Record Producer & Musicologist)



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About FrImp

FrImp? Free Improvisation, the chaotic primordial soup from out of which emerges the most vital music unimaginable.

Discipline & freak out, group consciousness & individual ego, skill, accident, intellect, animal, Yin & Yang & the bits in between, seeping through cracks in musical genres, absorbing and transforming styles and technologies and looking neither forwards nor back but straight in the face and kissing the face and watching the face grow old and die and loving it all, hallelujah!

We give our time freely to the running and management of this website. If we ever cover our costs and actually make a profit we shall invest that profit back into Free Improvisation and support musicians in the recording and production of their art.

The team:
Jamie Smith -The musician.
Paul Drewett -The technician.

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What is Free Improvisation

'What is it?' you ask.

A description is a limitation. To ask what it is, is to not have understood. You have to listen, not read. You have to hear, not see.

The human brain is a three pound blob of greyish organic material that can conceive of a Universe a hundred billion light years across. The pattern of sounds that create music to be appreciated by this grey matter has been controlled and stifled by cultural pressures and the brain was easily bored by the repetitive noises.

When musical notation limited the aural landscape degrees of originality and true expression were suffocated. Distinguishing music from noise depends entirely upon context and perspective. As explorers butted against cultural walls the boundaries were eventually and inevitably breached. With recording and mass production came an accelerated process of cultural sophistication and musicians escaped entirely from all formal constraints.

Now listeners are free to make what they will of the sounds they hear. Music need no longer feed the brain with just a satisfying pattern fixed by cultural experience. Free improvisation can communicate a transcendental experience with no reference to correlated sequences of sound.

From one greyish organic blob almost directly to another. It invites interpretation because it just is.

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