Evan Parker’s musical utopia - April 2010 The Guardian - By Stewart Lee - April 22nd, 2010

When I, a comedian currently fashionable in broadsheets, and an uncomprehending fan of Free Improvisation, was invited to publicise and programme Freehouse, the Cheltenham jazz festival’s new experimental strand, Evan Parker was the first musician I wanted to contact. For me, the 66-year-old saxophonist is the greatest living exponent of free improvisation. Nearly half a…

The FT Diary - April 2010 The Financial Times - April 11th, 2010

Last year the director of the Cheltenham Jazz Festival started noticing me at lots of Free Improvisation gigs, and when I became an e-list TV comedian, he wondered if I might be able to help program and promote a new strand of experimental jazz during the festivities. I agreed, and suddenly the promotional duties are…

Free Improvisation - April 2010 The Sunday TImes - April 11th, 2010

Over the May bank holiday weekend, the Cheltenham Jazz Festival bends its boundaries a little, making space for a music that’s entering its fifth decade of sustainable cult status, despite minimal airplay, minimal subsidy, and dismissal from mainstream critics. I’ve been pulled in to help promote three nights of so-called Free Improvisation, under the banner…

The Diary: Stewart Lee - December 2009 The Financial Times - December 5th, 2009

Sunday. I am seven weeks into the biggest stand-up tour I’ve ever done. Normally when I go back to a town with a new show I perform to about 25 per cent more people than before, building from audiences of about 100-150 to sometimes selling out 700-seater venues. But I did a TV series for…

Robyn Hitchcock – Live - February 2009 The Sunday TImes - February 15th, 2009

Islington’s Union Chapel is a foreboding venue for rock musicians. Its vaulted Victorian interior amplifies and supports the unplugged guitar or the naked human voice, but electrify the proceedings and indecipherable white noise bounces round the buttresses. Sometimes the holy formality of the space adds a magical, crispy frosting to an event, but sometimes it…

Jukebox - December 2008 The Sunday Times - December 7th, 2008

I bought my jukebox, a 1974 Wurlitzer Americana 3800, in the Spring of 1999. She holds 200 7” singles, gives off the purple glow of a fading radioactive sunset, hums like a fifties refrigerator, and reminds you what records were supposed to sound like, – not thin and compressed into machine computer code, but vast,…