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orfeo 5 - a year on the ice
'Jafrate's saxophone alternates between atonality and lyricism with sublime ease and Blezard's noises can be both unobtrusive and leading depending on the particular compositions....a mighty fine melding of breath, circuitry and oodles of ideas. Recommended.' - Wonderful Wooden Reasons
'saxophones with live electronics in winning combinations, restrained yet packed with information; they explore their own interior landscapes as much as they limn the craggy geography of West Yorkshire in sound.' - The Sound Project
'I just got up from laying down while listening to your music. man, what can i say? besides the prowess, i really love the organic quality. and big room to stretch. you have a great knack for keeping the balance between too much and not enough. transitions are seamless, and i love the scales the sax rides - they seem like the underside of what i would typically hear.' - Vicki Brown
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About orfeo 5
not so much a band as a project, orfeo 5 is a collective of musicians who use improvisation to find structure, and vice versa, and who specialise in making music from poems and other texts.
we are always on the lookout for hosts for our composing projects
our style blends jazz, blues, improv, loops, sometimes samples, sometimes a bit of minimalism and always a lot of passion, into powerful new songs, using texts from a variety of sources. We're trying to go through and beyond the European jazz tradition, blending folk elements with improvisation and free music, and with rhythms drawn from hip hop and world music.
But in any given performance, none of this may be true, because what we do best is improvise, so that we're always wandering through some kind of hybrid mix of our different approaches and backgrounds, and out again.
orfeo 5 was formed in 2002, and grew out of The Word Hoard's demo/text projects, which began in 1997. These brought writers and musicians together for a month to devise new text-music performances, with the last version of demo/text doing an 8 show national tour in autumn 2001. While demo/text always created excellent material, it also always left the musicians hungry to do more together, so orfeo 5 was formed.
orfeo 5 is available for bookings now. The group offers a performance and workshop package, where people can try out orfeo 5's text-music devising techniques for themselves. Writers and musicians of any level of ability can take part in the workshops, where they will be helped to create texts, and to try out various ways of performing these with the group. Usually, pieces produced in the workshop are performed before orfeo 5's own performance. We have the capacity to make multi-track recordings of any workshop performance and to master CDs from these, so that venue and participants can have a lasting record of anything produced in workshops.
We're especially interested in site-specific and/or issue-based work, and we're keen to investigate large-scale compositions and performances, if given the chance to dig in through residencies and long-term relationships.
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