Bill Laurance and Michael League, UK Tour, March 2025.
Monday, December 16, 2024
Pianist Bill Laurance and bassist/oud player Michael League will play a short series of UK live dates in early March 2025. Details attached.
From;
https://serious.org.uk/events/bill-laurance-michael-league
Bill Laurance & Michael League
Sun 02 Mar 2025–Tue 04 Mar 2025
“For us to take a common project and drive it forwards together is an affirmation of who we are: we’re just good friends and we’re celebrating that with this album.”- Bill Laurance
There are some duos which can seem as if they have been patched together. And there are others which come into being naturally and completely of their own accord. The pairing of pianist Bill Laurance and bassist/oud player Michael League is very much one of the latter; the two musicians have known each other since student days. During a chance meeting in Leeds, England, as sidemen on a one-off project, the two quickly formed a musical bond that would grow through the formation of Snarky Puppy in 2004 and its development over years of touring together, a number of solo al-bums and collaborations, and finally, in 2020, the birth of their duo.
Bill Laurance and Michael League’s new duo album, Keeping Company, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from all the extraversion, large scale and sheer oomph of Snarky Puppy; the focus here is on a shared inner perspective. That much is apparent immediately from the choice of instruments. Laurance has cast aside electronic keyboards and concentrates on piano, acoustic in sound although the piano strings have been occasionally and lightly prepared. Michael League chooses a fretless acoustic bass guitar and the oud. An extreme contrast to the pure groove of Snarky Puppy, here he goes for a transparently sparse but atmospherically rich sound. They do just fine without the band, creating a special freedom for both participants.
“The oud in itself has a specific associative space,” says Bill Laurance from the orchestral perspective of the piano. “When I compose, my aim is to transport the listener. That works with the sound of the oud. It’s not a guitar, it has something exotic about it. It’s a canvas on which you can paint a lot of things. On the first album, we discussed whether Michael should play a fretless nylon string guitar. He tried it out, but it didn’t produce the same emotion as the oud. Due to the oud being fretless, it can access a whole new world of expression and created new colours for the duo. That fascinated us.”
Bill Laurance and Michael League are still in the wonderfully inspiring phase of joint exploration. Everything is open. The music sounds spontaneous and intuitive. It has the power of the personal and builds on a friendship in which shared humour is a part of what happens naturally. Perhaps one day other players will join in. But for the time being, this intimate musical dialogue is the ideal form of artis-tic conversation for Bill Laurance and Michael League.
Sun 02 March
Stage time / 7:30pm
Doors / 7:00pm
Location
St. George’s,
Great George Street, Off Park Street
Bristol
BS1 5RR
https://www.stgeorgesbristol.co.uk/
Tickets
£30 + booking fee
Mon 03 March
Stage time / 7:30pm
Doors / 6:30pm
Location
Union Chapel,
Compton Terrace
London
N1 2UN
https://unionchapel.org.uk/
Tickets
£35 + booking fee
Tue 04 March
Stage time / 7:30am
Doors / 7:00am
Location
Manchester, RNCM,
124 Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9RD
https://www.rncm.ac.uk/
Tickets
£20 + booking fee