Nottingham Contemporary

A morning encounter with Linder and guests where artist and perfume expert Paul Schütze, artist Naima Karlsson (Moki Cherry’s granddaughter), Chatsworth House Head of Collections’ Kate Brindley and Nottingham Contemporary’s director Sam Thorne will be in conversation discussing a wide array of multisensory aspects behind The House of Fame exhibition.

The launch of the new book by local writer Graham Caveney The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness: A Memoir of an Adolescence published by Picador.

In The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness, Graham Caveney describes growing up as a member of the 'Respectable Working Class'. From aspiring altar boy to Kafka-quoting adolescent, his is the story of a teenage boy's obsession with music, a love affair with books, and how he eventually used them to plot his way out of his home town. But this is also a story of abuse.

Graham Caveney is a freelance writer based in Nottingham. He has written on music and fiction for the NME, The Face and the Independent. He is the author of two previous books, on William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

This event is organised in collaboration with Five Leaves Bookshop.

Alternately despised and rehabilitated, easy listening music dominated the popular music landscape from the 1940s to the 1960s. Lecturer in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham Nick Heffernan introduces a selection of recordings that attempts to encompass a sprawling, multifaceted and complex genre.

The Rebirth of the Protest Song in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter

The world's foremost exponent of the pianola, and University of Nottingham alumnus, plays a concert inside Gallery 2 using the pianola which is part of Simon Starling's work "Red, Green, Blue, Loom Music". The concert will include Stravinsky's Rites of Spring.

Rex Lawson was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1948. He studied music at Dulwich College, as a junior exhibitioner at the Royal College of Music, and at Nottingham University. Fascinated by his first pianola in 1971, he abandoned plans for a more traditional musical career, and initially concentrated on concerts with reproducing pianos, bringing back Percy Grainger to play the Grieg Piano Concerto at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1972, over ten years after the pianist’s death.

At the same time, inspired by William Candy, once the music roll critic of the Gramophone and Musical Times, Rex began studying the pianola, the foot-operated player-piano, making his major international debut in 1981 in Paris, performing in the world première of Stravinsky’s Les Noces (1919 trial version), under the direction of Pierre Boulez.

Highlights of a rewarding international career have included an appearance as soloist at Carnegie Hall in George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, the renewed resuscitation of Percy Grainger for the Last Night of the Proms in 1988, and the first concert performances of nearly all of Stravinsky’s pianola works, including the Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, and the first performance with live pianola, of the newly-completed 1919 version of Les Noces, with James Wood and the RIAS Kammerchor, at the Berlin Festival in 2013. In recent years Rex has had two pianola concertos written specially for him, by the British composer, Paul Usher, and the Venezuelan, Julio d’Escrivan, and in 2007 he gave the first pianola performance of Rachmaninoff’s 3rd Piano Concerto, with the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra under Yoel Levi.

Rex Lawson pursues a parallel career as a musicologist and lecturer, participating in many academic symposiums and university courses. Rex has recorded extensively, with many CDs still in current catalogues.

Patrick Henderson surveys Jamaican pop music from the 1950s to the present day, playing and discussing examples of mento, ska, reggae and dancehall and considering their cultural significance.

Three UK jazz writers - Graham Lock, Victor Schonfield and Chris Trent - speak about their encounters with Sun Ra and play some of their favourite Arkestra tracks and live concert footage.

Graham Lock is a freelance writer and was a Senior Research Fellow in American Music at Nottingham University. He interviewed Sun Ra in 1983 and 1990, and included chapters on him in his books Blutopia and Chasing the Vibration. He also wrote liner notes for Sun Ra CDs on the Blast First, Hat Hut and Leo labels. His latest books, as co-editor with Nottingham colleague David Murray, are the collections The Hearing Eye and Thriving on a Riff, which look at jazz and blues influences in African American art, literature and film.

Victor Schonfield promoted new music in the 1960s and ’70s, presenting both Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra in the UK for the first time. He organised the Arkestra’s debut European tour, for which he wrote programme notes, and also prepared selections of Sun Ra’s writings for publication in the UK jazz press. He later wrote the sleeve notes for Sun Ra’s Pictures of Infinity LP on the Black Lion label and was a regular contributor to Downbeat and Melody Maker. He is currently working on a book about his favourite jazz musicians.

Chris Trent has been enthralled by Sun Ra's music since first encountering the records in the mid 1960s, and experiencing Sun Ra in person in Liverpool in 1970. For some years after that he continued to listen to Sun Ra's music on record, fascinated by its spirit and vitality, and the sheer number of levels on which Sun Ra was dealing. Wanting to contribute somehow, he began to write down details and think about the music he was listening to, assessing the discographical information then available against the many puzzles set by the records. Coming across the first Sun Ra discographies in print, Chris began corresponding with the authors and sharing ideas. Without ever intending it, he was becoming a discographer. In the 1990s he was invited to become co-author of the second edition of Robert L Campbell's book “The Earthly Recordings Of Sun Ra”. He has contributed sleeve notes to some Sun Ra albums.

Chris remains totally fascinated by Sun Ra's musical project, and (a non-musician) tries to contribute a little to some of the music he loves as a recording engineer. He lives in central England.

Sun Ra expert and author of Travelling the Spaceways: Sun Ra, The Astro Black, and Other Solar Myths (2010) John Corbett in conversation with Irene Aristizabal (Head of Exhibitions) about Corbett’s activation of the Sun Ra archive.

John Corbett is a music critic, record producer and curator. He is the author of Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (1994) and a new book, Microgroove: Forays Into Other Music (2015). His writing has appeared in Downbeat, The Wire and many other publications. He has written extensively on Sun Ra, as well as co-curating a major exhibition Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn, and Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68. Corbett lives in Chicago, where he is co-owner of Corbett vs. Dempsey, an art gallery.

Glenn Ligon, artist and curator of our current exhibition, speaks about the influences that have shaped his practice and what it means to be led by the work of others.

Can climate change be seen to create opportunities? And if so, for whom? A gathering of those with a stake in the environmental debate provides an informal space for discussion and debate on issues relating to capitalism, climate change and activism. The atmosphere is open and audiences are encouraged to ask questions. Convened in collaboration with Rebecca Beinart and David Bell, guest speakers include Out of the Woods Collective and Platform, London.