Cambridge Jazz Festival at Hot Numbers: Kevin Flanagan

Kevin comes from Lowell, Mass. USA. After dropping out of high school (whoops), he co-founded the group Antares, an jazz and improv-based cooperative which toured New England and the UK in the mid-70’s to early 80’s. During this period he was also involved in blues and popular music, both in performing and recording sessions. He settled in the UK in the early 80’s and worked on the London jazz and pop scene; playing, touring, and recording with various rock and pop artists, as well as West African High Life and Salsa groups. He shifted primarily to jazz, playing with his own group and the Tommy Chase Quartet at festivals in the UK such as Glastonbury, Brecon, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Brighton and festivals in Europe in Milan, Paris, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and the North Sea Jazz Festival. He has put out two CD’s of compositions with Chris Ingham, Zanzibar and Textile Lunch, and, working with David Gordon, two CD’s, Riprap and Snow-Blue Night. This is in addition to working both with poets in commissions from the TS Eliot Festival, John Clare Festival, and other events, and as an instrumental quartet playing around the usual venues.

He has had works commissioned by the SPNM and others performed by orchestras and ensembles in London and Cambridge. Apart from continuing as a performer, he is pursuing a number of collaborations with poets, dancers and painters. He has currently just worked on a series of Arts Council sponsored ambient installations for the artist Jane Perryman which have toured galleries in Sweden, the US, Scotland, Wales, England and India. The Peddars Way Project, in 2019, was funded by the PRS Foundation Music Creators Fund. He has created several pieces the choreographer Eva Aymami in a project concerned with coastal communities threatened by climate change in 2024, and a commission from the Buxton Gallery of Contemporary Art, in Melbourne.

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