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Portico Quartet

The Portico Quartet are a bunch of guys in their early twenties who play instrumental music. Formed four years ago from two sets of schoolfriends, they share a house in East London, make recordings, and play festivals and clubs. Yet what distinguishes them from dozens of other Hackney hopefuls is the way they sound - a fresh, unclichéd resynthesis and reinvention of music that's both pleasingly familiar and thrillingly new, like World Music from the future. With largely acoustic resources - percussion, bass and wind instruments - they have conjured and refined a group signature that's immediately recognizable. Thanks to the use of the hang, a tuned percussion instrument bought on impulse at a music festival, they have a sound that is instantly attractive, yet uncompromisingly individual, and it's this, combined with the cheerful eloquence of their performances, that has brought Portico Quartet a long way in a short time.

The line-up of the band is Duncan Bellamy (drums), Milo Fitzpatrick (double-bass), Nick Mulvey (hang and percussion) and Jack Wyllie (soprano, tenor saxophones and electronics). From a grassroots start in 2005, busking on the South Bank of London's Thames, their reputation spread swiftly. They began to get paid bookings plus the odd festival, and they made a five-track CD to sell at gigs. In 2007 they signed a record deal to make a full length CD, Knee Deep In The North Sea (Babel/Vortex). This was a turning point: the album attracted attention from DJs, bloggers and critics of every stripe, and was nominated for the 2008 Mercury Music Prize alongside Rachel Unthank, The Last Shadow Puppets, Radiohead and Elbow a win-win situation for credible newcomers like Unthank and Portico Quartet.

Now the band has another album in the can: Isla (Real World Records, out October 2009) is a thoughtful and richly tuneful collection of nine pieces recorded by producer John Leckie at Abbey Road no. 2, a studio room made legendary by George Martin, the Beatles, Kate Bush and many others. Leckie's track record as a catalyst for emerging talent is legendary: not only for the famous examples, Stone Roses, Doves, XTC, Radiohead, but also for pioneering systems orchestra Lost Jockey (which spawned Man Jumping, ZTT's Andrew Poppy, Orlando Gough, and soundtrack supremo John Lunn) and World Music stars such as Rodrigo & Gabriela and Papa Wemba.

Their story begins in 2004, when Bellamy and Mulvey, who met at sixth form college in Cambridge, first encountered the hang at a temporary music shop at WOMAD, the World Music festival then held at Rivermead in Reading. Bellamy bought one of four left in stock: 'It had been my birthday, and I had some money in my account, and I borrowed the rest off friends,' he laughs, 'because "why not."' A few days later, Mulvey phoned up to order another one, making sure it was in a sympathetic key, and they started to experiment. Invented and first made in 2000 by Felix Rohner and Sabina Schaerer of PANArt in Bern, Switzerland, the hang is a dimpled, dome-shaped tuned metal percussion instrument, like two woks welded together. The sound is reminiscent of the mbira (thumb piano) and the steel drum, but the hang has a tunefulness and resonance that derives from its significantly different overtones.

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6
Multiple Reviews

Revisiting and Reinventing: Lionel Loueke and Portico Quartet

Read "Revisiting and Reinventing: Lionel Loueke and Portico Quartet" reviewed by Geno Thackara


Rearrangements and self-remixes can have a checkered story, yet sometimes the right treatment can give something just as much of a fascinating life the second time around. Lionel Loueke (with Gilles Peterson) HH Reimagined Edition Records 2022 Reinvention is one of Lionel Loueke's specialties already—from solo or duo works to the Afro-jazz trio Gilfema, his voice (figurative and literal) transforms any source songs with frisky rhythm and joyous flavor. Guitar and loops were ...

10
Album Review

Portico Quartet: Terrain

Read "Terrain" reviewed by Geno Thackara


Much like the world of its creation—that of spring 2020, in the early phase of the Covid-19 shutdown—this Terrain is a landscape both familiar and strange. The ingredients of Portico Quartet's one-of-a-kind sound are recognizably there: the nebulous electronic soundscaping, the organic and gently compelling rhythms, the resonant tone of the hang drum which always feels beamed in from the beach of some distant planet. Like every album of theirs, though, it's a surprising step sideways from the previous one ...

10
Album Review

Portico Quartet: Memory Streams

Read "Memory Streams" reviewed by Geno Thackara


If it was possible to directly sublimate lucid dreams into sound, it isn't hard to imagine the results coming out somewhat like this. Music is made to simulate that kind of loose natural flow of thoughts often enough, but it's more rare for it to capture the experience as directly and vividly as Portico Quartet do on their sixth full-length. Memory Streams isn't just suggestive of memories flowing and shifting, it feels like a fleeting, mysterious, wash-through-your-mind dream in itself. ...

5
Year in Review

Geno Thackara's Best Releases of 2017

Read "Geno Thackara's Best Releases of 2017" reviewed by Geno Thackara


My second year playing in the All About Jazz sandbox has been even more packed with great times and great musical discoveries than the first. I had the pleasure of reviewing plenty of terrific recordings just as strong or highly-rated as those on this list, not to mention some superb live shows, but these were the personal favorites that simply hit the spot the most. Portico QuartetArt in the Age of Automation Gondwana Records

9
Album Review

Portico Quartet: Art in the Age of Automation

Read "Art in the Age of Automation" reviewed by Geno Thackara


It's an inevitable rule that pretty much any piece of automated technology, especially digital technology, gets criticized for replacing something natural. The synthesizer invited a backlash when it was used (and yes, often misused) as a substitute for 'real' instruments--ditto the computerized tones and robotic timekeeping of MIDI and digital programming. Nonetheless, it's just as inevitable that after each seemingly soulless invention comes along, someone figures out how to use it in ways artistic and meaningful. Joe Zawinul made early ...

9
Live Review

Guinness Cork Jazz Festival 2013

Read "Guinness Cork Jazz Festival 2013" reviewed by Ian Patterson


Guinness Cork Jazz Festival Various Venues Cork Ireland October 25-28, 2013 Whether it was chance or fate is debatable but the fact is that had it not been for a cancelled bridge tournament the first Cork Jazz Festival might never have got off the ground. The 35th Guinness Cork Jazz Festival was officially launched in the Gresham Metropole Hotel, with a bit of the red carpet treatment for guests, sponsors and local dignitaries. It ...

132
Extended Analysis

Portico Quartet

Read "Portico Quartet" reviewed by John Kelman


Change is inevitable, but when a group loses one of its founders and biggest conceptual fundamentals, can it really survive the loss? When Britain's Portico Quartet announced the departure of co-founder Nick Mulvey, whose hang (a UFO-shaped instrument that sounds somewhere between steel pans and gamelan gongs) was one of its most defining characteristics, the group's future certainly seemed in peril. Hard enough to replace any instrumentalist who's been so much a part of a group's musical lexicon, but just ...

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64

Performance / Tour

Portico Quartet: US Tour Starts Today

Portico Quartet: US Tour Starts Today

Source: JamBase

BAND MAKES US DEBUT IN SUPPORT OF NEW ALBUM ISLA Today in Minneapolis, UK's critically acclaimed Portico Quartet kick off their first ever U.S. tour supporting new album Isla. Full tour dates are below. Portico Quartet U.S. Tour: Sept 22—Minneapolis, MN @ Cedar Cultural Center Sept 24—Cedar Rapids, IA @ CSPS Sept 25—Chicago, IL @ World Music Festival Sept 27—Kent, OH @ Kent Stage Sept 28—New York, NY @ Joe's Pub Sept 29—Brooklyn, NY @ Coco 66 Sept 30—Philadelphia, PA ...

153

Performance / Tour

"Singular" Portico Quartet Add Stateside Dates; Watch Hypnotic Live Video

"Singular" Portico Quartet Add Stateside Dates; Watch Hypnotic Live Video

Source: Michael Ricci

“SINGULAR AND TALENTED" (TIME OUT LONDON) PORTICO QUARTET ADD DATES TO FIRST EVER NORTH AMERICAN TOUR UK's Portico Quartet have added new dates to their first ever North American tour supporting Isla (Aug 31/ Real World Records), including stops in Cambridge, MA, Kent, OH, and Montreal. Watch this live footage of Portico Quartet performing “Line" on 'Band on the Wall' in Manchester to see their “Steve Reich mathematics, Radiohead dread, African desert grooves and ECM northern melancholy" (MOJO) in action ...

194

Interview

Innovative British Group Portico Quartet Interviewed at AAJ

Innovative British Group Portico Quartet Interviewed at AAJ

Source: All About Jazz

The history of Portico Quartet is brief, but it's also eventful. Since forming in 2005, this young British band have seen their first album, Knee Deep In The North Sea (Babel, 2007), become a Mercury Music Award Album of the Year, they've gathered rave reviews for their second album, Isla (Real World, 2009), and they've introduced a brand new acoustic instrument into the jazz repertoire. Although much of their music is recognizably “jazz," their use of the Hang creates a ...

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band / ensemble / orchestra

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Concerts

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Mar 29 Fri
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OPIA
Tivoli/vredenburg
Utrecht, Netherlands

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Terrain (Extended)

Gondwana Records
2022

buy

Terrain

Gondwana Records
2021

buy

Monument

Gondwana Records
2021

buy

Memory Streams

Gondwana Records
2019

buy

Art in the Age of...

Gondwana Records
2017

buy

Live/Remix

Babel
2013

buy

Videos

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