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Ken Hyder

KEN HYDER, drums, percussion, voice, has been playing and composing music for over 40 years. In that time he’s produced over thirty albums of original material. He began playing jazz in his native Scotland before moving south to London where he studied under John Stevens " himself a renowned workshop leader and innovator. Hyder formed Talisker and went on to make six albums with this pioneering and proto-type Celtic jazz group. In the 1970s he began moving away from jazz and into collaborations with musicians from different musical backgrounds including Irish, South African and South American players. Later, he became interested in exploring spiritual aspects of music with spiritual practitioners like Tibetan and Japanese Buddhist monks, and Siberian shamans. He has conducted improvisation workshops, and also workshops dealing with improvisation and folk musics, and with spirit in music. In London he has worked at the Royal Academy of Music, Community Music and Music Works. Elsewhere he has run several workshops in Russian conservatoires (Moscow, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kyzyl); France, Italy, Germany, Holland and Finland. “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 “Ken Hyder's drumming always appears connected to the world beyond narrow musical concerns. It comes with a context, picking up on place, the past, people met and local practices. “At the same time he favours strong, well-defined musical statements, entirely free from ornamental excess and fuss.” Julian Cowley, The Wire


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Book Excerpts

How to Know: Spirit Music - Crazy Wisdom, Shamanism And Trips To The Black Sky

Read "How to Know: Spirit Music - Crazy Wisdom, Shamanism And Trips To The Black Sky" reviewed by Ken Hyder


The following is an excerpt from the “Instability as an Aid to Spirit Music" chapter of How to Know by Ken Hyder (Amazon Digital Services, 2013). There is a tension between precision and looseness. In jazz, the tension is minute, but it makes all the difference to whether the music swings or not. In the old days, jazz bands and dance bands often played the same tunes. In a dance band it was usually stiff. ...

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"Hyder's debut record - Dreaming of Glenisla recorded 1975 - sounds for all the world like an Albert Ayler album released post-New Grass. The twin sax/twin bass lineup of Hyder's quintet creates a droning, cantatorial spiritsound one can imagine as the sound of Ayler's dreams." Doug Schulkind, WFMU "In a recent interview, Hyder remarked that shamanistic drumming has nothing to do with timekeeping; it is a means of accessing spiritual energy. Beyond all expectations, this recording actually touches that energy source - it is charged with visceral yet transcendent vibrations

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Siberia Extreme

indigenous lifeforms
2020

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