ART WOLF
kate westbrook   mike westbrook
chris biscoe       pete whyman
ART WOLF: Mike Westbrook, Chris Biscoe, Pete Whyman, Kate Westbrook
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With ART WOLF the Westbrooks unleash a radical new quartet, and a new album on the Swiss label altrisuoni.
One of the many collaborations between composer Mike Westbrook and librettist Kate Westbrook, ART WOLF is inspired by the life and work of the Swiss Alpine painter Caspar Wolf (1735 - 1783) whose very signature was the image of the wolf. Through improvisation, text and formal composition, this powerful new work revolves around the role of the Artist, the "Art Wolf", and the nature of creativity.
Chris Biscoe and Pete Whyman have each worked independently with Kate and Mike Westbrook, through a series of projects over 20 years, and together as members of the Mike Westbrook Orchestra, and the current New Westbrook Orchestra. ART WOLF brings these four musicians together for the first time in a quartet context.
ART WOLF:
Kate Westbrook (voice / tenor horn)
Mike Westbrook (piano / euphonium)
Pete Whyman (saxophone)
Chris Biscoe (saxophone)
texts Kate Westbrook
music Mike Westbrook
ART WOLF was commissioned for the re-opening in October 2003, of the Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau Switzerland, which houses a unique collection of Caspar Wolf's work. Subsequent performances of the piece include tours and festivals in the UK, Switzerland, Italy, France, and Russia.

The ART WOLF album, produced by Jon Hiseman, was released in 2005
on the altrisuoni label.
Kate Westbrook's repertoire embraces Contemporary Music, Opera and Music Hall, as well as Jazz and Popular Song. She has sung with ensembles as diverse as The London Symphony Orchestra, her own band The Skirmishers, Heribert Leuchter's 'Lux Orchester', the NDR band and the many Westbrook groups. Kate's libretti range from cabaret songs to opera. Recent recordings (for the Voiceprint label) include Goodbye Peter Lorre featuring the Brecht / Eisler 'Hollywood Elegies', and Cuff Clout, a neoteric music hall, in which her lyrics are set by eight composers from the worlds of jazz, rock, pop and contemporary classical music. Her composition The Nijinska Chamber (on Voiceprint) a celebration of the dancer and choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, features Kate's voice with accordionist Karen Street. Her latest release, 'allsorts', a Duo album with Mike Westbrook, is available on acs records.
Pete Whyman works in many areas of contemporary music. He has been involved in jazz and music-theatre projects with the Westbrooks since the mid-80's. He regularly performs works by such composers as Louis Andriesson, Graham Fitkin, Michael Nyman and Luciano Berio; and plays with the Delta Saxophone Quartet and the London Sinfonietta. He is a member of the Steve Martland Band and of cellist Matthew Barley's "Between the Notes". In the Pop field, he works with Spiritualised, Barry Adamson and William Orbit. Peter recently released a Trio album 'Pulse' on the FMR label.
Chris Biscoe appears as featured soloist and sideman in many leading jazz ensembles, touring and recording with (among others) George Russell's 'Living Time' Orchestra, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, Hermeto Pascoal, and the Orchestre National de Jazz under the direction of Didier Levallet. Chris has worked with Kate and Mike Westbrook since the late 1970's, notably since 1982 as a member of the Westbrook Trio. Chris leads and writes for his own group, The Chris Biscoe band. His current quartet album 'Gone in the Air', the music of Eric Dolphy, (on Trio Records) features Chris in partnership with fellow saxophonist Tony Kofi. Other groups/recordings also include a Duo with cellist Ben Davis, pianist Liam Noble's quintet, the improvising group Full Monte, and a quintet with trumpeter Harry Beckett.
Mike Westbrook has led and composed for a succession of Big Bands and small groups since the 1960's. He has toured extensively throughout Europe and further afield and made 50 albums. His principal compositions for Jazz Orchestra include Citadel/Room 315 featuring John Surman, On Duke's Birthday dedicated to the memory of Duke Ellington, Big Band Rossini which was featured in the 1992 BBC Proms. Compositions for voice include settings of European poetry, notably in The Cortege and The Westbrook Blake. ART WOLF is one of a whole series of collaborations with Kate Westbrook that ranges from their jazz cabaret Mama Chicago to Waxeywork Show written for his current sextet, The Village Band. His recent album Chanson Irresponsable, performed by the New Westbrook Orchestra, a group that combines jazz and classical musicians, is released on Enja Records.
ART WOLF is available on CD
More Information
Information and Booking: admin@westbrookjazz.co.uk
ART WOLF Poster
Art Wolf Poster
It's a fair certainty that Oil and Pencil on Cardboard ranks as one of the more unusual titles for a new jazz composition. It is also a pretty unusual piece, with the saxophones of Pete Whyman and Chris Biscoe scurrying across their range, snarling, screaming and swirling, with moments of lyrical calm thrown in.
ART WOLF at St. Cyprians - photo: David Sinclair © http://www.jazzphotographs.com 
In celebration of his 70th birthday in the stone and gold splendour of St Cyprian's, the piece proved that Mike Westbrook is still one of Britain 's most creative, experimental and daring jazz composers.

His suite Art Wolf is a setting of lyrics by his wife Kate that celebrates the work of the Swiss painter Caspar Wolf, an 18th-century landscape artist whose depictions of the rugged alpine landscape were dramatically rendered into chippy, rocky musical structures.
The composer's spartan piano conjured up the vastness of the chill mountain scenery in the opening to Pale Parasol, a reminder of Wolf's practice of including everyday objects in his pictures to create a sense of scale. Meanwhile Kate Westbrook's declamatory style, slipping from song to speech and from crisp English to German, teased out the metaphor of an artist whose very signature was a wolf, scratching a living from the inhospitable landscape.
Most Westbrook concerts also have an inbuilt sense of fun, and although we had to wait for the second half for his congeniality and good humour to emerge properly, his four-piece brass band swaggered its way through Oil Paint on Canvas. This had all the lilt and lift of his best big-band writing, the composer's bass horn setting up an ostinato against which the saxophones and Kate's baritone horn swaggered and swung. This joyous feeling returned in the encore, a Martinique song whose Caribbean warmth sent us happily out into the alpine cold of a London evening.
ART WOLF concert at St Cyprian's, London 22/03/2006.
Alyn Shipton - The Times
ART WOLF at St. Cyprians - Kate & Mike Westbrook - photo: David Sinclair © -  http://www.jazzphotographs.com
Alyn Shipton 4 Star Review
Alyn Shipton 4 Star Review
Alyn Shipton 4 Star Review
Alyn Shipton 4 Star Review
Kate and Mike Westbrook fell in love with the work of the Swiss painter of alpine vistas, Caspar Wolf (1735-1783). They especially appreciated that the painter liked to put himself into the painting: a tiny figure among the sublime immensity of mountains and glaciers.
"Art Wolf" is held together by a recurrent bass figure, played by Mike Westbrook on the piano or the euphonium, supported by Kate's tenor horn and the two excellent saxophone players Chris Biscoe and Peter Whyman.
But once again the most exciting thing was what Kate Westbrook, who rightly has been called "an actress of song", did with the lyrics. She had some of them translated into German, the language of Caspar Wolf, and Mike Westbrook used the translated texts as a basis for still more compositions. The result of this was that the same lyric would be sung in English as a swinging jazz tune, with the saxophonists playing catchy riffs - and as an abstract German "sprechgesang". When Kate Westbrook speaks a line like "Das Kunstwolftier knurrt", an animal is conjured up before us, the like of which we have never seen.
Thomas Bodmer - Tages-Anzeiger, Zurich 07-03-05
Inspired by and in tribute to the 18th century Swiss painter Caspar Wolf, this beautiful record is about the loneliness and external exile that many artists seem to undergo. A parallel perhaps between the subject here and the creators of this music? As with Wolf's wonderful Alpine scenes, Mike's music speaks for itself. With less than a handful of instruments, sometimes just a piano and voice, Kate and Mike create huge canvasses of their own to compliment Wolf's landscapes. 'Art Wolf Sketches' builds into a towering peak lifted by the simplest but most direct of texts. 'Oil Paint On Canvas' follows the appropriately stately and elegiac 'Exile', its lightness of pace and mood strangely counter the lyric that focuses both on the the artists materials and the irony of landscape contained inside home or museum. The long 'Art Wolf Scavenges' returns to the earlier theme, musically and lyrically. With a dark and coruscating solo from Biscoe aided by Hiseman's percussion, it's as if Kate's lyrics have succeeded in in capturing the essence and terror of the creative process. 'Unsigned Panorama' and 'Sketching Party' are two lovely instrumentals and the closing 'Whose Wolf Art Thou?', with its wry lyric, is a powerful ending to an excellent album. Its music, and Art, that works as a series of miniatures or, if expanded for an orchestra, would work on a grander scale.
Duncan Heining - Jazzwise August 2005
The decades-long association of Mike and Kate Westbrook goes ahead and anew with this superb new record, a true gift actually, one that combines classicality and experimentation in a perfect blend of good taste and matured energy. It is a commissioned work inspired by the art of Swiss painter Caspar Wolf (1735 - 1783), whose alpine painted landscapes are reproduced in the accompanying booklet.
Kate's interpretation of her own lyrics in both English and German unveils her versatile singing, intense and seductive, fluctuating somewhere between intimist sighing and expressionistic cabaret exasperations. Mike, alternately at piano and euphonium, expertly directs the music with arrangements that make the band sound a lot greater than just a quartet.
Exemplary, often tremendous, are the two other contributing musicians - particularly Chris Biscoe, with the Westbrooks since the early 80's - while John Hiseman is also featured on a couple of tracks.
Libero Farnè [MUSICA JAZZ . August-September 2005]
A characteristically thought-provoking, multi-disciplinary Westbrook project, Art Wolf explores the role of the artist (specifically the eponymous eighteenth-century Alpine painter Caspar Wolf), the springs of creativity and the consequences of commitment to the artistic life. Mike Westbrook’s music, by turns lyrical, tender and fiercely passionate as it attempts, in Kate Westbrook’s words, ‘to touch Caspar Wolf, to celebrate his vision and skill, to understand a little his artist’s life with exile and hardship, [his] battles with himself and the world, as he searches for beauty and truth’, is perfectly judged both to accomplish this goal and as material on which his tight but imaginative band (himself on piano and euphonium, Kate on tenor horn, Pete Whyman on soprano and Chris Biscoe on tenor and soprano) can either stretch out in fierce, extended improvisation or negotiate his stately horn arrangements as required. Kate’s dramatic, emotive vocals are perfectly judged, complemented as they are by Biscoe’s abrasive and Whyman’s sinuous saxophones, and the whole, in which composed and improvised elements are skillfully blended, is at once wholly enjoyable for its straightforward jazz content and intellectually satisfying on a level achieved by few contemporary musicians.
Chris Parker - Jazz at Ronnie Scott’s
Reviews
ART WOLF at St. Cyprians
Mike Westbrook, Kate Westbrook,
Pete Whyman, Chris Biscoe

photo: David Sinclair ©
http://www.jazzphotographs.com
ART WOLF at St. Cyprians
Kate & Mike Westbrook

photo: David Sinclair ©
http://www.jazzphotographs.com
Too much of this would be hard going, but Westbrook has learnt a trick or two in his long career, and the musical diet was leavened with some simply breathtaking soprano saxophone solos by Pete Whyman. Sinuous and sinister, his sparkling sound made the most of the glorious acoustic of the church and between some dazzling torrents of notes added a romantic lyricism.







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Kate & Mike Westbrook
Kate and Mike Westbrook