Starting season 21 with a live episode from Love Supreme 2025

Welcome to the latest episode of Harmonious World, in which I interview musicians about how their music helps make the world more harmonious.

I've just returned from Love Supreme 2025 and I had the delight of interviewing Fergus Quill, Pete Roth and Mike Pratt as well as Daniel Casimir.

I'll let them do the talking, but you can find out about their music as well as hear discussion of Ferg's Imaginary Big Band (read my review of them at Ronnie's here) Dan Coulthurst, Nico Widdowson (who I also heard perform at Watford Jazz Junction), Binker Golding and Camilla George.

The track you can hear at the start and end of this episode is the Harmonious World theme tune, composed and performed by pianist Joe English.

Thank you for listening to Harmonious World. Please rate, review and share: click on the link and subscribe to support the show.

Don't forget the Quincy Jones quote that sums up why I do this: "Imagine what a harmonious world it would be if every single person, both young and old, shared a little of what he is good at doing."

Transcript

Hilary 0:00

Hello and welcome to a little video of what life was like at Love Supreme twenty twenty-five. I had an absolute blast, and you can read my reviews of eight of the three days on my new website at hilarycrony.co.uk. This is the first episode of season twenty-one, and I'm delighted that it's the Love Supreme special. The first person I interviewed was Fergus Quill, who I had seen a little earlier with Ferg's imaginary big band.

Fergus 0:35

Thank you for your lovely Ronnie's review as well.

Hilary 0:37

Oh honestly, it was such a pleasure.

Fergus 0:41

Is it you play as well, don't you?

Hilary 0:43

Yeah, very much play. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So obviously I love best. Yeah.

Fergus 0:47

We all love best.

Hilary 0:48

Yeah, absolutely.

Fergus 0:49

Is that alright?

Hilary 0:51

That's picking it up. It's picking up loads of background.

Fergus 0:53

Yeah, yeah, amazing.

Hilary 0:54

Anyway, thank you for joining me for this for Harmonious World. Um, talk to me about what it means for you to be at Love Super 8.

Fergus 1:03

Oh, it means any opportunity we've got to play music for the people is always a dream. It's especially nice today, the crowd's a bit lovely, everyone's been super kind, and it was great to have the opportunity to play two different sets of music at two different times. Music's different in the morning as it is as opposed to the evening.

Hilary 1:19

Yeah, absolutely. And of course, I heard you a couple of weeks ago at Rolling. Um is it my imagination or have you got a bigger band this time?

Fergus 1:28

Who knows? I think maybe. I think all the stragglers come out on the big stages. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Um it might be a bigger band. It's like once it gets over 25, I find it pretty difficult to keep track.

Hilary 1:40

Absolutely.

Fergus 1:40

As long as like there's someone covering every part that I've written, I'm kind of like if other people sneak on.

Hilary 1:46

Which is really interesting because it brings me to um your writing process and things, because it could feel like the chaos is completely chaos, but it's not.

Fergus 2:00

No, no, it's well, yeah, it's structured. There's no such thing as chaos in the universe.

Hilary 2:05

Absolutely.

Fergus 2:06

Um yeah, no, uh, yeah, sometimes, I mean, obviously there's there's noise elements in the music, there's a lot of free improvisation, there's a lot of stuff that's like by ear, and like I'm changing on the fly, but equally there are uh very strict arrangements, and that's why like that's a big thing I got from Sunra, which is like uh having something like incredibly structured and refined next to something with no structure and re and refined and and it's it's again it's about when you've got a big band, it's about light and shade, being able to play. It's really easy to play really loudly, um, and it's really easy to just read a bunch of charts, but like what if you play really quietly with no music at all? That's like something that not many big bands do for some reason, and I don't know why. Because it sounds great, you know.

Hilary 2:45

Oh, it really does, it really does. And there's some lovely moments. I mean that the um trumpet with the harmon mut when What is it today?

Fergus 2:53

Yeah. Oh Danny, yeah. He's an amaz Danny C. He's he's an amazing trumpet player and amazing composer and musician. You should be hit to him. He's got one album out called BBT.

Hilary 3:05

What's his name?

Fergus 3:06

Um I think he would have been that happens under Dan Coalhurst, but like everyone calls him Danny C these days.

Hilary 3:11

Okay, fine, I'll check him out.

Fergus 3:12

So he's an amazing, great singer, great um, yeah, great dancer, great trumpet player.

Hilary 3:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then of course you've got the marvellous Nico on the piano. And I'm a I'm a great fan of his having seen him at uh Watford Jazz Junction as well. So he's a great player.

Fergus 3:30

He's the pianist in my trio as well.

Hilary 3:32

Yeah, oh okay, right, yeah.

Fergus 3:34

And um there's lovely bits where he's going crazy, and then there's other bits where he's really like Well Nico, I don't know anyone who knows as much about like the stride playing of Willie the Lion Smith and the intergalactic, you know, like Sounds of Sunra or like Misha Mendelsberg or like you know, he's like so swinging so out. Yeah, um you know, like he encompasses the whole of the piano. Absolutely uh from from I played it, I went on a game with it the other day and he wanted to play a bunch of Scott Jopler tunes.

Hilary 4:10

Right.

Fergus 4:10

You know, and he's playing them like how he plays everything, like in his own style, but he was like, this we're gonna play a bunch of music from the turn of the century. But like, you know, Nico can Nico encompasses the whole of of jazz piano. Yeah. All of it, which is which is amazing.

Hilary 4:26

Yeah, so who are you who are you gonna check out now? Now you've finished, who are you gonna check out here? War plays? I know, four o'clock.

Fergus 4:32

Four o'clock of C War. Yeah. I don't really know who else.

Hilary 4:36

Um there's stuff on every stage, all the stage.

Fergus 4:40

Yeah, no, I'll definitely see I'll definitely see see war. Um that's about I've got no idea who else is.

Hilary 4:47

The roots are on later.

Fergus 4:48

The roots are on. I hope they're not bringing Jimmy Fallon.

Hilary 4:50

No, I don't know that would be weird. Brilliant. Okay, well, fantastic, thank you so much. And that's a really real pleasure to talk to you.

Fergus 5:00

Oh man, it's a pleasure, pleasure to speak to you.

Hilary 5:03

I loved interviewing Fergus. He's a great guy. So all of the links I'm gonna put into the show notes so you can follow up all of these things. My next guest. I've got a double hand. I've got the heat rock and micro. I love the crew. So here we have Pete Roth and Mike Pratt. Pete Roth and Mike Pratt. That's right. Excellent. I really enjoyed your trio gig with Bill Bruford. Thank you. Um it was amazing. Um, your bass is um is like it seems to work really well with uh Pete's guitar. So, how long have you played together?

Pete 5:53

Well, we Mike and me probably over the last 10-15 years, um uh in and you know in and around this London scene and in sections, we play quite a fair bit together. But as a band with as a trio, we're only really going since last year's September properly.

Mike 6:08

Right.

Pete 6:09

Um, we probably started a bit earlier, um uh but just as a as a jam band, just to enjoy some music together. You know, Bill came came back from uh sort of a semi-retirement, I guess, and um uh he had sort of a yantus and um uh and he came back from that, and so we just started jamming with no aim to ever gig whatsoever.

Mike 6:28

So it was all just exploring music together, just three people loving it, and but that quickly changed, and I think we started to find a sound that we wanted to explore more. So, for instance, I started off playing a double bass and then changed to electric bass, and we're using more pedals now and having a slightly more electronic sound. Right. It's interesting because Bill is known for using electronic percussion in the past with his other bands, uh, but he's chosen to just stick with an acoustic kit while we go the electric route, which uh you know creates a fun sound for it.

Hilary 6:58

Yeah, absolutely. And and there's a real connection between the three of you on stage, I've noticed that so so I guess you're enjoying playing together.

Pete 7:08

Yeah, well, 100%. Enjoying is the wrong word, really. It's uh it's it's really um just sort of the best place to be.

Fergus 7:13

Yeah.

Pete 7:14

Um there's there's two things also we've really written on our flag, and that is we make every performance quite unique. So there's elements, they're fixed, so we have some framework, but there's a lot of elements which we deliberately don't want to be cornered into a specific way, so we have to look, we have to listen, we have to react to each other. So looking around, having eye contact and enjoying each other's playing, it's it's core to what we do, otherwise we're we're not really doing what we want to do.

Hilary 7:41

No, absolutely, and and it seems like some of the compositions are composed, devised by the three of you, and some each one of you has brought, is that right?

Mike 7:52

Absolutely right, yeah. We've all we've all brought ideas ranging from complete pieces to just musical cells, really. Um that's something that's been really exciting about this project. Bill will come with a rhythmic idea and say, do something with it, uh, and we get together or independently we come up with some ideas that work with it. Uh, and none of that is set in stone, so it can change or even be sabotaged, uh, you know, changed into something completely different. So it's very flexible.

Hilary 8:21

Very good. You've both got, and obviously Bill has a huge history. You're obviously not very old, I'm not saying that, but you have a huge history of people you've played with, each each of you, and I think it's really interesting to bring that together. Do you feel like that works because you've uh you've you've played with so many other people?

Pete 8:44

I I think that's that's the key to it, is like the flexibility and the openness to explore music and to and to explore music and to play with with anybody and meeting people on their turf on their musical, you know, um uh where they are on their musical place. Yeah, I think that having developing that sensitivity, I think it's only possible when you play with a lot of people.

Hilary 9:04

Yeah, right.

Pete 9:05

Yeah, I don't think that's possible in isolation, I don't think something you can develop at home.

Hilary 9:09

No, right, so what's next? Are you gonna record all this stuff? What are you gonna do?

Pete 9:13

So that's a really interesting one with this, we discuss it a lot. Um, because every performance we allow ourselves to shape that performance depending on how the room reacts, depending on the audience, the size, which place we're in, what we are exploring at that moment. Um, so that it's a constant evolution. And on the other side, a lot of the music now, right now, it's all visually consumed, so it's all about the video, it's all about so release, it's more about seeing what people do than rather than hearing. Yeah. That we almost made a conscientious decision at the moment for now to not record anything and we you know like audiences to enjoy the live performance and enjoy the space with us for now. Um that that having said, you know, we we we might as well you know at one point maybe get together and say now it's the right time, or yeah, or this is uh this is something we want to maybe have like a picture almost like you know you're shooting a uh a photo, you know, and say, Okay, this is a photograph of that moment, a musical photograph, and you know, maybe something like that.

Hilary 10:13

Fantastic. I was really lucky to get that conversation with uh Pete and Mike, and it's a shame that uh Bill Brieford wasn't available to be there, but he'd already dashed off to something else. Anyway, my next guest was Dan Casimir. Dan Casimir's big band started Sunday morning, so this was a real pleasure talking to him. Hey Dan, how are you doing? Good, how are you? Oh, I'm brilliant, I'm really good. I love your big band! Thank you. In a world where people aren't writing for big band, you are. That's freezing. Yeah, no, it is, it really is, and having the having the confidence to, you know, the power of your convictions and to keep going on it. Um, how long ago did you write the pieces? How you know when when did they come from?

Daniel 11:00

Um so most of the pieces uh were written about two years ago uh around the record recording. Um there was one track from the festival called Don't Be Afraid, which that was written maybe about three or two months ago.

Hilary 11:15

Okay, oh it's that new! Yeah. Oh wow, oh that's brilliant. Do you write on your own or do you collaborate with other people? Do you know how how finished are things when you come into the rehearsal studio?

Daniel 11:28

So, with um with the ones with the vocals, um, I have Rhea Moran with the songs that she feat features on, right? The vocals and and her melody on them. And so it's it's that's definitely more collaborative, so I'm kind of fitting the arrangements around the melodies that she comes up with. But the instrumental ones I I kind of have to have them finished before I sure, yeah.

Hilary 11:50

Yeah, that's a whole different thing, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Um, and what about uh so you've got an amazing band, Binker Golding, obviously as MD, that's incredible!

Daniel 11:59

Yeah, yeah.

Hilary 12:00

How how long have you worked with him?

Mike 12:03

Oh I think maybe since 2015, 14, so yeah, me and Binker, we go way back.

Hilary 12:08

Yeah, yeah, and then obviously you've got Camilla George and Freddie on trumpet, you've got a whole load of people in there who are amazing.

Daniel 12:15

Yeah, I'm really lucky to have it.

Hilary 12:17

Yeah, no, that's really good. So the album Balance, when did that come out?

Daniel 12:22

That came out in July last year, I think the 26th of July.

Hilary 12:27

Right, okay, so I need to check that out because I haven't heard it. So and I really love your writing. Thank you. There's a real maturity about it that belies your age, really, I think.

Daniel 12:39

Um I'm I'm secretly really old, that's fine.

Hilary 12:43

Brilliant, so what's next?

Daniel 12:45

Um just just on to the next project. Um I'm hopefully to uh aiming to write maybe another big panel, maybe maybe a larger orchestral ensemble. Yeah, um funding dependent on it. Of course. But yeah, I'll write and see what happens.

Hilary 12:59

Right. Well that's the that's the way to do it, isn't it? To write what you what you want to write and then see who's gonna pay for it. Fingers crossed, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, it's so nice to talk to you, Dan, honestly. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. As you can tell, you don't get a lot of time with these guys when you're backstage. But at least I had some time with all of them, with Fergus Quill, with Pete Roth, Mike Pratt, and then Daniel Casimir. It was a real pleasure talking to all of them about their experience. What else are they getting out of the day?