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Ken Hyder

Scottish drummer Ken Hyder moved from traditional music, to jazz, then to Scottish jazz and then collaborating with musicians from all over the world including Tibetan and Japanese Buddhist monks, and Siberian shamans.

About Me

Scottish drummer Ken Hyder has extensively toured the northern hemisphere from Vancouver to Vladivostok with a wide-ranging variety of jazz musicians and ethnic musicians including Russian diva, Valentina Ponomareva, Celtic musicians Dick Gaughan and Tomas Lynch, Tibetan and Japanese Buddhist monks, and Siberian and Korean shamans.

At the end of the 1960s he formed Talisker, a band set up to play jazz and Celtic music.

He also played with jazz/improv musicians like Maggie Nicols, Elton Dean, Jim Dvorak, Larry Stabbins, Nick Evans, Tim Hodgkinson, Sylvia Hallett and Phil Minton but also with folk musicians like Frankie Armstrong, Sainkho Namtchylak and Scottish piper Dave Brooks.

He studied Celtic music in Scotland and in Ireland with grants from the Arts Council of Great Britain - and also shamanic drumming and khoomei overtone singing in Tuva, on the Mongolian border. Since 1990 he has done regular tours of Russia, and in particular Siberia, with a range of musicians in the area around Lake Baikal, and in Tuva and the Altai - both on the Mongolian border.

Current projects include K-Space with Tim Hodgkinson - now a duo with guests following the death of the third member, and one of Tuva's most prominent musicians, Gendos Chamzyryn; Hoots and Roots, with Maggie Nicols; a duo with Vladimir Miller; a duo with Italian reeds-player Lello Colombo - and The Dynamix with Jon Dobie and Scipio. There is also La Dolce Visa with guitarist Piero La Rocca from Sicily.

And the new Ancient and Modern duo of Mark HEWINS and Ken HYDER have known each other since the 1970s when they met in London and played, and recorded together.

But since then they have had different, but often parallel musical paths. Mark was a part of the Canterbury scene, working with musicians like Richard and Dave Sinclair, Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper, Pip Pyle, and John Greaves, while Ken developed and recorded several albums with his pioneering Scottish-Jazz fusion band, Talisker, as well as playing in bands with performers like Keith Tippett and Harry Beckett.

Later, Mark went on to work with a very wide range of musicians and bands, including Trevor Watts, Elton Dean, Bob Geldof, Lou Reed, Django Bates, John Martyn, Gong and Andrew Cyrille, while Ken began playing and recording cutting edge music with different musicians from many different ethnic backgrounds, like South American and South African players, to Tibetan Buddhist monks and Siberian shamans – particularly with K-Space.

Lots more info and tracks at - www.kenhyder.co.uk

He has also run specialist music workshops in Italy, France, Germany, Britain, Finland, Holland and Russia.

Ken Hyder has recorded over 30 albums and CDs.

“He has provided a blueprint for the increasing number of European musicians who have been incorporating elements of folk music into their jazz.” —The Guinness Who's Who of Jazz

“Hyder has one of the strongest strokes in jazz, deployed with an astonishing technique. Not for a moment does his polyrhythmic machine falter, his four limbs continuing to beat with an implacable precision” —Oest France

“Hyder's now long-standing involvement in trans-Siberian, shamanic music comes across in hauntingly vocalised passages and in his remarkably open-minded and uncluttered sense of musical space.” —Penguin book of Jazz

“The significantly just-right, economic and precise playing of Ken Hyder.” —Improjazz, France

“This is one of the all-time great albums of folk-jazz to come out of Britain - or anywhere - in the last 30 years.” —Fanfare, New York (on Talisker's Land of Stone)

“A remarkable album—the deepest kind of fusion.” —Penguin Guide to Jazz On CD re The Known Is In The Stone