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New album "speech" out now.

This is a solo performance project that interweaves music and poetry by Paul Taylor in a kind of poetry slalom. Music frames poems; poems shape music.

After a Lancastrian brass-band boyhood and three brilliant years at Hull University, Taylor shifted gear and plunged into jazz and London. Then, in a doomed bid for stardom, he joined the legendary soul/rock band, The Bureau.

Returning swiftly to jazz, he began a long-standing association with composer Roland Perrin, in his bands, Evidence and The Blue Planet Orchestra.

Taylor also moved in on the London Latin music scene, in the carefree days before salsa dance classes, where he has worked with Columbian maestro Roberto Pla's Latin Ensemble since it began, and with La Clave. He also records and gigs with Snowboy & The Latin Section and Manteca.

In amongst all this he worked with South African pianist Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, Loose Tubes, 3 Mustaphas 3, and The Pogues, joining them at one of Time Out's all-time top 100 London gigs, at the Town & Country Club, when Joe Strummer was on board. Another great musical ally is Pete Williams, a comrade-in-arms on a Dexys Midnight Runners tour.

The trombone poetry project grew out of work with the pioneering trombone trio, The Blowpipes, and part of the aim is to bring the power, range and charm of this poorly-understood instrument to new audiences, many of whom have been reared on a meagre diet of guitars and the occasional saxophone.

As for the poetry, decades of reading on trains, planes, tour buses and park benches have led Taylor to make his own marks on paper, to shape some kind of sense out of it all.

Aside from poems born out of a musician's experiences, and performed alongside freely improvised musical illustrations, commentaries and explorations, there is a growing range of other poetry, concerning design, science, and mathematics. Some of this work is inspired by the inventions and writings of the French group, Oulipo, some by the inventions and writings of the American designer, Buckminster Fuller.

Trombone poetry has been performed in jazz clubs, poetry festivals, acoustic clubs, free-improv events, theatres, and on Resonance FM and BBC Radio 3's The Verb.

For more blather, and the odd poem, please visit the trombone poetry website.

Paul Taylor plays a Rath trombone.

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