About

Click here to download our Press release (17mb)

Harmonic is an artist led jazz festival in Birmingham, UK. The festival’s Artistic Directors are bass player Chris Mapp and trumpeter/bass player Percy Pursglove. Both are members of the Birmingham collective Cobweb Collective which has been running nights around Birmingham for the last 5 years including the highly successful Thursday night session at The Yardbird jazz club.

Harmonic is a celebration of all the good things happening in Birmingham. The focus of the festival is on Birmingham/Midlands based musicians and the creation of new music and ensembles. Often overlooked by the national press, Birmingham has a vibrant and diverse jazz scene. Harmonic is a great opportunity to check out some of the creative jazz musicians applying their trade in the second city.

The first edition of Harmonic will take place on the 11th – 13th March 2010 at various venues around Birmingham. On Thursday 11th March, we’ll be at The Yardbird jazz club in Paradise Place for the weekly Cobweb session but with a Hamonic twist including some very special artists. Friday 12th March sees another weekly Birmingham jazz staple get a Harmonic makeover with Ben Markland’s Quintet at Symphony Hall Foyer at 5.30pm. After that we have a real treat at one of the finest places to watch live music in Birmingham, the CBSO Centre. New York’s Claudia Quintet have visited Birmingham before and have strong links with some of the Musicians here. They’ll be giving a very special performance with Matt Mitchell on piano playing music from their up-coming album. For the second set they’ll be joined by Birmingham based musicians Percy Pursglove on Trumpet and Steve Tromans on Rhodes playing some of Claudia’s music re-arranged for Octet by John Hollenbeck. This is a co-promotion with Birmingham Jazz and will be the only performance in this format.

Saturday 13th March is the main day of Harmonic. We’ll be taking over the CBSO Centre from 5pm to bring you 4 amazing bands. First up, Zappajazz’s trumpeter Aaron Diaz’s latest project Moon Unit will be giving their debut performance. Following that bass player Chris Mapp heads a new band, Gambol, playing music written by Chris which has been drawn from his experiences of living in Birmingham for the last ten years. Vocalist Sara Colman is next up playing brand new songs for the very first time at Harmonic with a brand new band. Finally we’ll be presenting Paul Dunmall’s Ghostly Thoughts trio with John Adams on guitar and Mark Sanders on drums. There’ll also be duos of musicians from Cobweb Collective playing in the foyer area throughout the day to keep you entertained between the sets in the main hall.

Tickets will be available for each day separately as well as a combined weekend ticket which offers great value for money. We’ll also have tickets available for individual bands at the CBSO Centre on Saturday 13th March if you can’t make it for the whole day. A great way to try out Harmonic is through one of our two free events. Both The Yardbird event on 11th March and Symphony Hall foyer on the 12th March are free entry.