Night Sessions The Dowland Project & John Potter

• 1 First Descent 01:17
• 2 Menino Jesus À Lapa 07:07
• 3 Recercar 01:13
• 4 Can vei la lauzeta mover 06:51
• 5 First Triage 06:58
• 6 Man in the Moon 07:30
• 7 Corpus Christi 02:54
• 8 Whistling in the Dark 05:24
• 9 Swart Mekerd Smethes 05:03
• 10 Fumeux fume 03:23
• 11 Hortus ignotus 04:11
• 12 Mystery Play 03:40
• 13 I Sing of a Maiden 03:57
• 14 Theoleptus 22 05:53
• 15 Second Descent 00:30
• 16 Second Triage 05:23
• 17 Prelude 01:06
• Total Runtime 01:12:20

Info for Night Sessions

From its inception, John Potter’s Dowland Project has drawn upon different musical traditions, including those of ‘early music’ and improvisation. The Night Sessions album emphasizes the Project’s improvisational flexibility, as the players create new music, sometimes with poetry as inspirational reference and guide. There are also a number of ‘daytime’ pieces worked up, Potter says, from small amounts of notation: ‘Menino Jesus à Lappa’ is based on Portuguese pilgrim song fragments and ‘Theoleptus 22’ built around a Byzantine chant. Lute fantasias are taken from Dalza’s Intabolatura de Lauto (Venice, 1508) and Attaignant’s Tres breve et familiere introduction…a jouer toutes chansons (Paris, 1529). The oldest compositions are ‘Can vei la lauzeta mover’ – a love song by the 12th century troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn, and Fumeux fume by the 14th century avant-gardist Solage. Two incarnations of the Dowland Project are heard here, the original band with Potter, Stephen Stubbs and John Surman joined by Barry Guy and Maya Homburger, and the revised line-up with Miloš Valent on violin and viola. Yet the music, recorded at St. Gerold sessions in 2001 and 2008, reflects a unified sense of purpose.

“The day music is how the Dowland Project usually works” John Potter explains in a liner note. “The night music came about through rather special circumstances. We’d finished recording and were celebrating a very creative couple of days working on the album that became Care-charming sleep. Sometime after midnight, after a very convivial evening, Manfred Eicher suddenly said, ‘let’s go back into the church and record some more...’. Manfred has been the group’s moving spirit since first getting us all together and has been an inspirational participant in all our musical dialogues, so we could hardly say no... but we had run out of music, having already recorded more than would fit onto one album. The moment provided the music: as it happened, I had some medieval poems with me, so we decided to see what we could do with those.”

Potter told some more of the story in his essay in Horizons Touched (Granta, 2007): “What followed was, for me, the most remarkable hour’s music-making I have every experienced. With all inhibitions gone, and the sense that we were creating something absolutely in the moment, we set about realizing some of the poems. I read them out first, to give the players something to go on, then we set off... We did each poem once only, and they ranged from a lullaby improvised over a lilting bass clarinet riff to a loud and violent number with the full band summoning up a fourteenth-century blacksmith at his forge.”

John Potter, tenor
John Surman, saxophones, bass clarinet, percussion
Stephen Stubbs, lute, chitarrone, baroque guitar, vihuela
Maya Homburger, violin
Miloš Valent, violin, viola
Barry Guy, double bass

Recorded September 2001 and January 2006, Propstei St. Gerold
Engineered by Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

John Potter's
musical collaborators include lutenist Ariel Abramovich, the Dowland Project, Red Byrd, the Gavin Bryars Ensemble and the composer Ambrose Field. He is a member of the German ensemble The Sound & The Fury, and with fellow tenor Christopher O’Gorman is a part of the Hyperion/University of Southampton Conductus Project. A writer and scholar as well as a singer, he has published four books on singing and is a former British Library Edison Fellow. He is Reader Emeritus in Music at the University of York, having left the university in 2010 to focus on his portfolio of freelance activities.

John's eclectic performing experience has ranged from first performances of works by Berio, Stockhausen, James Dillon and Michael Finnissy to backing vocals for Manfred Mann, Mike Oldfield and The Who (among others). Red Byrd, the group he founded with bass Richard Wistreich, has recorded music as diverse as Monteverdi (both straight and with electric guitars), Leonin (3 albums for Hyperion) and the Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones (for Factory Records). He was a major contributor to the Hilliard Ensemble’s Officium project (for which he has five gold discs), and subsequently developed many of the ideas in The Dowland Project’s four albums for ECM; he also produced the first three ECM albums by the Scandinavian trio mediaeval.

Current projects include new music for voices & vihuelas by Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, and Southampton University's Conductus Project. This exploration of 12th/13th century music consists of three albums for Hyperion with fellow tenors Christopher O'Gorman and Rogers Covey-Crump, and a live programme with a film by Michael Lynch). His lute song repertoire with Ariel Abramovich ranges from Thomas Ford to Benedetto Ferrari and beyond, and includes programmes of Dowland and Campion. He is also very busy as an ensemble coach.

The Dowland Project
began as an artistic collaboration between John Potter and ECM's Manfred Eicher, and was an attempt to re-discover the essence of renaissance song from the point of view of a modern performer. John suggested Dowland and Manfred Eicher proposed augmenting the obligatory early music players with jazz musicians. The first recording for ECM brought together John Surman, Barry Guy, Maya Homburger and Stephen Stubbs and was a Sunday Times Record of the Year. The group made its live debut at the Bremen Musikfest, and has since performed on both sides of the Atlantic including St Patrick's Cathedral New York, the Munich Opera House and the Festival de Musica Visual, Lanzarote. A second album - 'Charming Sleep' took the process a stage further with a similar treatment of English and Italian songs from the post-Dowland generation.

Booklet for Night Sessions