Frontiers Festival
Library of Birmingham: Mezzanine Cafe
Broad Street
Birmingham
Start time 5.30pm
Free Entry

Steve Tromans - piano
Sid Peacock - vocals/narration
Simon King - guitar

As part of this year's cutting-edge Frontiers Festival in Birmingham, with a theme of downtown New York avant-garde experimentalism, Tromans and Peacock revisit their work "Beat Generation Cut-up and Fold-in", which premiered in Paris in 2010, at the Center Culturel Irlandais. Between 2004-2009, Tromans set the texts of the four major early works of Beat Generation writers Allen Ginsberg (Howl), Jack Kerouac (On The Road), William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), and Gregory Corso (Bomb). The resulting musical settings were toured around the UK at music, poetry, and literary festivals, and performed at avantgarde venues in Birmingham and London. Tromans has returned to these musical setting, approaching them from a wholly new angle: With narrator Sid Peacock and guitarist Simon King, he will present an interpenetrated performance of material from each – a contemporary nod in the direction of Burroughs’ famous use of the cut-up and fold-in method of generating new prose.

Library of Birmingham
Centenary Square
Broad St
Birmingham B1 2ND
12.15pm start
Free Entry

Sid Peacock - direction/narration
Ruth Angell - violin/vocals
Steve Tromans - piano
Mark Sanders - drums/perc
Aaron Diaz - trumpet/fx
Lluis Mather - tenor sax
members of the Thallein Ensemble

A new interpretation of Riley's classic 1960s American Minimalist work. Promises to be a highlight of 2014. Absolutely do not miss this major music-making event!!

Karamel Club
Chocolate Factory
4 Coburg Rd
London N22 6UJ
8pm start
Free Entry

Jonathan Mayer - sitar
Steve Tromans - piano
Mitel P - tabla
Andrew Bratt - drums

Following on from their successful month-long workshop and premiere at London's Cockpit Theatre in summer 2013, the quartet return to the three-movement work they co-composed during that time for this special performance at the Karamel Arts & Theatre space. Expect the unexpected: the remit for the original project was to reinvent one of the world's oldest music-making forms, Indian Classical.

Music and Philosophy Conference
Department of Music and Department of Philosophy
King’s College
Strand
London WC2R 2LS
Start tbc
Entry tbc

Steve Tromans - spoken word and piano

As part of the 4th Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group in collaboration with the Music and Philosophy Study Group of the American Musicological Society, Tromans' presentation is focused on our understandings of what constitutes the work proper to academic research in music. Drawing on examples from his own practice-as-research, Tromans speculates that artist-researchers in music performance are in a privileged position to be able to take a disciplinary stance beyond the limits of the documented, and of the documentable.

Jazzlines Free Gigs
Symphony Hall
Broad Street
Birmingham B1 2EA
5pm start
Free entry

Steve Tromans - piano
Alison Symons - vocals
Lydia Glanville - drums
Plus others tba

From Birmingham Symphony Hall's website: "This band made its debut at Symphony Hall Café Bar in July 2013 and was an immediate favourite of the audience. Taking inspiration from Nina Simone and Cassandra Wilson, the combination of Steve Tromans’s piano playing and Alison Symons’s vocals is very powerful."

Performance Studies Network 3rd International Conference
Cambridge University
Faculty of Music
11 West Road
Cambridge CB3 9DP
11am start
Entry tbc

Steve Tromans - spoken word and piano

Improvisation has long been considered a spur-of-the-moment act: intuitive rather than disciplined, bodily-instinctive rather than mentally-rigorous. Tromans will propose a model of improvisation that attends to the contingent, temporal factors inherent in events of performance.