Rachel Musson & Nikki Yeoh duo

Rachel Musson / Nikki Yeoh DuoRachel Musson - Sax Nikki Yeoh - PianoThis is a duo that both players have long wanted to bring to audiences, and I’m pleased to say JABMC is one of the first venues to host this truly wonderful duo.Rachel Musson is a saxophonist, improviser and composer based in the UK. She is a current (2024-2027) recipient of the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Composer award. She has spent the last decade immersed in improvised music and has also gradually been introducing composed elements into her work, drawing on text, field recordings and processing sounds. She is involved with a variety of improvisation projects, and works regularly with Mark Sanders, Pat Thomas, Hannah Marshall, Julie Kjaer, Corey Mwamba, Olie Brice, Alex Ward, Alex Hawkins amongst others. She features on several releases, including a nonet featuring her composition 'I Went This Way' (577 Records), two with Shifa, feat. Pat Thomas and Mark Sanders, (577 Records), one with Mark Sanders and John Edwards (Two Rivers Records), trio with Liam Noble and Mark Sanders (Babel), and Corey Mwamba (Takuroku)."A free-improviser sensitive to melody-like narrative and dramatic pacing" – John Fordham, The GuardianNikki YeohNikki Yeoh is a British jazz pianist who has worked with Courtney Pine, Cleveland Watkiss, Steve Williamson, Chante Moore, The Roots and Neneh Cherry. Some of her first music teachers were Don Rendell and Ian Carr. Yeoh has a long-standing collaboration with drummer Mark Mondesir and his bassist brother, Michael Mondesir in the jazz trio Infinitum. Yeoh was the musical director for the finalists of the BBC Young Jazz Musician 2020.In 2022, she was appointed at MEI (Music Education Islington) and Guildhall as the Lead for Jazz, Improvisation and Pop. Yeoh won The Independent award for Best Jazz Musician of the Year in 1996 and in 1999 was a semi-finalist at the piano competition at the Montreux Jazz Festival. She won Jazz FM Instrumentalist of the Year in 2017.Reviews/press“Rachel Musson's new qroup playing her original new music; I'd expected an evening of freewheeling improvisation, but this was different, I suppose you could call it 'structured free improv'. Yes, there was plenty of room for free blowing, but all somehow contained within Rachel's fascinating meditative compositions. I found myself being transported to deepest Asia then brought back to earth with some Scandi-influenced jazz before a section that reminded me of contemporary European Classical music - this was fascinating stuff and very entertaining. I hope Rachel takes this quartet into the studio because this music and the chemistry within the band deserve to be recorded”END