A BRIGHT NOWHERE: Journeying into Improvisation

Dir. Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz

UK, 2023, 103 mins

A documentary drawn from a remarkable series of concerts of improvised music at London’s Café OTO. Filmed across four Saturday nights in July 2022 when over 30 musicians joined improviser, percussionist and animateur Eddie Prévost on stage for a residency marking his 80th birthday.

The film offers a candid look at improvisers who create music in the moment, free from the authority of a composer, score or conductor. The musicians focus entirely upon real-time collective exploration and as their compelling music unfolds the cameras take us to the heart of the action with revealing intimacy. Including interviews with a selection of musicians including John Butcher, Ute Kanngiesser, Marjolaine Charbin, Nathan Moore, Alan Wilkinson, Sue Lynch, John Tilbury and Eddie Prévost himself. There is also a glimpse inside the weekly London improvisation workshop established by Prévost in 1999, and readings by musician and author David Toop.

The film reaches a powerful finale with a concert by AMM, the pioneering improvising group co-founded by Eddie Prévost in the mid-1960s. This was the group’s final performance – named as a Concert of the Year 2022 in The Wire magazine – a combustible duet between Eddie Prévost and Keith Rowe incorporating samples of recordings by the group’s absent third member, John Tilbury.

“Elegant … astonishingly moving” – film review in THE WIRE magazine, September 2023