Concerts at Anaverna House

Portico Quartet are a modern Jazz group  from London who started out busking and on occasion still do. Their sound is given an ethereal or hypnotic quality by the Hang, a percussion instrument developed over the last ten years. You can find  videos of Portico on YouTube including the one at this address:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSk0HmTJL_o You can read more about them in the Music Network’s press release (below) or their website http://porticoquartet.com/

For tickets (e18, students e5) email verelc@gmail.com or ring Kate on 042 9380836. Pay at the door but please reserve your tickets in advance.

You are welcome to stay for supper (e25) with the musicians after the performance. Book early as numbers are limited.

Directions to Anaverna and a map are on the page “Directions to Anaverna” which you can click in the margin on the righthand side of this screen.

You can contact me at verelc@gmail.com or 042 9371490

Here is Music Network’s Press Release

“Floating somewhere between jazz and modern classical music, this young group make a strikingly original sound.” The Times

“genuinely innovative…there isn’t a band that sounds remotely like them…” **** stars” Observer Music Monthly

“A joy to listen to, full of depth and detail” Word Magazine
Music Network presents the weird but wonderful sound of Mercury-prize nominated UK Portico Quartet, showcasing tunes from their recent album Isla which has been described by MOJO as a brew of, “… Steve Reich mathematics, Radiohead dread, African desert grooves and ECM northern melancholy …a chiming cavernous sound-world that is both exotic and hypnotic”.
Portico Quartet are four young musicians from East London who sound like nothing you’ve ever heard before. A group that’s both ground-breaking and wildly popular, they hit the headlines in 2008 when their debut album Knee Deep In The North Sea was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. Critics began to think the unthinkable: could a young group fresh from busking across Europe take on the pop might of Radiohead and The Last Shadow Puppets - and win? To make matters worse, the group already had the sort of word-of-mouth cult following normally associated with the likes of Pete Doherty. What’s going on?

The answer is simple: music that is breathtakingly original yet chock-a-block with hummable tunes and killer hooks. There’s more - great grooves, atmospheric soundscapes and the silvery tones of something once described as ” two woks glued together” - the hang,
both a rhythm and melody instrument that gives Portico Quartet their trademark hypnotic tone.

Still in their early ‘20s, Jack Wyllie (saxophones and electronics), Milo Fitzpatrick (double bass), Nick Mulvey (Hang and percussion) and Duncan Bellamy (drums) live together and describe their ethos as like an indy band that plays post-jazz rather than as a traditional jazz outfit. It’s the unique mix of loops, ethereal sax, otherworldly hang, clattering drums and earthy double-bass that gives their music it’s inimitable, beautiful sound. And it was the chance purchase of the hang by Duncan Bellamy, at a music festival, that inspired the young friends to start a band, and while their largely intuitive music references jazz and African music, it’s the hang inspired trance-like repetitive patterns that propel the band into stranger pastures: invoking Philip Glass and Steve Reich as well as Radiohead or the unique Scandi-jazz sound of EST.

Portico Quartet’s unique brand of atmospheric hook-heavy post-jazz was honed busking across Europe and playing in unusual spaces; churches, galleries and chill-out zones and in just a few years Portico Quartet’s hypnotic music has taken them from busking on London’s South Bank, to a Mercury Prize nomination, to recording at Abbey Road Studio 2 with producer and famed nurturer of young bands John Leckie (Stone Roses, Radiohead, Muse etc).

If you’re not already a fan: this band is quite unlike anything you’ve ever heard before. If you are, you’ll know to book early!

“Floating somewhere between jazz and modern classical music, this young group make a strikingly original sound.” The Times

“genuinely innovative…there isn’t a band that sounds remotely like them…” **** stars” Observer Music Monthly

“A joy to listen to, full of depth and detail” Word Magazine