Lol Coxhill RIP

The wonderful free improvising saxophonist has died in hospital aged 79 after several weeks of serious illness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRbQxLQg5FI

Sad news indeed. Only managed to see him play 3 or 4 times but he was great on all occassions.

Lol used to be a fairly regular customer at the rec shop I used to work in. Distinctly remember him raving abt Anthony Braxton's performance at a London jazz festival in the early 2000s (Braxton was supporting Cecil Taylor). Was inspiring to hear someone of his age still getting enthused abt music, and the work of a fellow performer.

Last time I saw him play was on one of those crazy free improv boat-ting nights on the Thames, maybe six or seven years ago - and yeah, he was great, obviously v secure in his style/method by that point, but by no means just going through the motions. A thinking, listening, breathing player. RIP.

Think the first time I encountered him was watching a late night documentary on him on Channel 4 in about 1990. Lots of footage of him in his flat rummaging through a trunk and digging out all sorts of weird wind instruments, and also eulogising Sidnet Bechet iirc. Which might all sound a bit mundane but portrayed him as a very endearing, down-to-earth and rather funny bloke. Wish I could find it online.

This list of guest apearances is great btw:

Shooting at the Moon by Kevin Ayers and the Whole World (1970)
No Roses by Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band (1971)
"Tokoloshe Man" by John Kongos (1971)
Boo by Juliet Lawson. Sovereign Records (1972)
1984 by Hugh Hopper (1973)
The Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories by Kevin Ayers (1974)
Music for Pleasure by The Damned (1977)
The Death of Imagination by Penny Rimbaud. Red Herring Records (1975)
Lol Coxhill & Totsuzen Danball. Wax Records TKCA-30119 (1983)
The Wimp and The Wild John Otway & Wild Willy Barrett (1989)

Really need to investigate his work more -- first heard about him via that Damned connection! There's a great story in Carol Clerk's book on the group I should dig up...

ahhhhhhhhhhh shit

this is the only thing i have stored in my instapaper, must've read it a million times on the tube, a great read

http://www.lolcoxhill.com/text/context.htm

RIP

riplol

"possibly the only saxophonist who could claim to have played with Anthony Braxton, Tommy Cooper and The Damned"

This is just awful, awful news - my first ever gig was watching him in a record shop. Have started going to concerts again (came back from a recital tonight) and was wondering about him...

Know he was 79, just taking this way harder than I should - maybe its all the deaths of guys you've seen over the years and then the ones that will come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxCm389G1zQ

LOL RIP

David Toop on Lol :

http://davidtoopblog.com/2012/07/10/end-of-play-for-lol-coxhill/

nice - and Judy Dyble in the comments, too!

To me, this is the measure of an improviser: a player who moves beyond their comfort zone, chips away at their own aesthetic and tics, risks foolishness and failure and yet builds operational spaces in every situation, no matter how rote or ridiculous. The rest are just stylists.

otm.

Bill Wells remembers Lol Coxhill in the Quietus:
http://thequietus.com/articles/09351-bill-wells-remembers-lol-coxhill

Interview is by the same cretin who wrote that lousy Ghost review for the Guardian - this 'question' is especially awful:

He's got that thing that Richard Youngs also has: a deep sense of grace that sets him apart from all that god-awful droning and scraping that sets itself up as being on the edge of something. The conservatism of the self-styled avant-garde!

down with the avant-garde conservatism of all that self-styled god-awful scraping

and up with that deep sense of grace, like that nice Richard Young.

s

god-awful droning and scraping

Can't beat it imo

watching sally potter's ORLANDO (1992) i am startled by his sudden appearance as a butler ladling out soup

In terms of unexpected cameos in British arthouse hits, I was going to say that's up there with Jim Davidson in Peter Greenaway's Zed and Two Noughts but then I thought that's unfair to Lol and Sally Potter.

here's his imdb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0185304/

so he was in caravaggio alongside tilda swinton and in an earlier sally potter short: london story

(as a musician she was part of the feminist improvising group, which was all-women but also overlapped with henry cow, and he was definitely cow-adjacent)

I had to wiki Feminist Improvising Group to see if Georgie Born was involved, as indeed she was. Didn't know about Sally Potter's involvement, ty - first encountered her work when her short film Thriller was one of the films I saw as part of a film studies course at Birkbeck. Interesting to compare Mike Ratledge scoring Laura Mulvey's Riddles of the Sphinx, another radical feminist film studies staple - I like all the interconnectedness of these things in the 70s.

Great 'trailer' for Thriller - the first adaptation of an element from Hitchcock's Psycho in an abstracted art film context?

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/86583