Tom Skinner

Running time: 90 minutes 

Robert Stillman, saxophone; Chelsea Carmichael, saxophone; tbc, cello; Tom Herbert, double bass; Tom Skinner, drums 

Drummer, composer and producer Tom Skinner has been a vital, central figure in London’s burgeoning underground music scene for two decades. He is best known as a founding member of Sons Of Kemet, the jazz group he formed with his frequent collaborator Shabaka Hutchings. He is also the drummer for The Smile, where he blends jazz and krautrock with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. He has performed and recorded with Grace Jones, Meshell Ndegeocello, Mulatu Astatke, Floating Points and The Invisible, to name just a few. A sought-after collaborator with some of the world’s most renowned electronic producers, he has also launched several unconventional musical projects of his own.

2022 saw the release of Voices of Bishara, his debut album as the leader of a septet, inspired by Abdul Wadud’s 1978 solo cello album By Myself. Last year, his second album, Kaleidoscopic Visions, came out under his own name on the esteemed Chicago-based label International Anthem. The album leans towards introspective, fully composed pieces, complemented by the improvisations of bassist Tom Herbert and cellist Kareem Dayes, the atmospheric melodies of Robert Stillman and Chelsea Carmichael on various woodwinds and reeds, and occasional guitar interludes by Portishead’s Adrian Utley. The meditative spiritual The Maxim features the astral vocals and bass playing of Meshell Ndegeocello. A role model whom Skinner first saw perform at Glastonbury as a teenager, Ndegeocello is now, years later, working on an album with him.

The kaleidoscopic visions that define Skinner’s album are a meditation on his past work and life choices, a reckoning with his wins and losses – as befits an artist in his middle years. Skinner thus looks back at the territory he has covered and towards the path ahead, which may indeed be shorter, but is still winding and full of possibilities, even if perhaps no longer as wide. Drawing on the wisdom and painful experience of failure, as well as the elation of victory – all in the shadow of mortality, responsibility and inevitability – Skinner pays tribute to two figures among his friends and role models: the novelist Paul Auster and his mother, a former concert pianist prodigy who abandoned her own promising career to devote herself to family life.

Tom Skinner’s concert promises a backward glance, a vista of the future, as well as a contemplation of the emotional here and now.