Westport Sound 25 Acts Confirmed (with many more to come)
137 (Larry Stabbins / Jim Barr / Adrian Utley / Seb Rochford) – Saturday 11th October
Post-jazz art rock supergroup with members of Portishead, Sons of Kemet & Get the Blessing.
That all rare thing, a supergroup of considerable individual acclaim & experience, free of ego, connecting instead through musical commitment to the collective. Their strong individual identities remain however, and only act to weave together a web of determined sound. Larry Stabbins, collaborator with Keith Tippett, Louis Moholo, Tony Oxley & Peter Brötzmann alongside popular soul-jazz success with his 1980s group Working Week, frequently snakes & soars above a driving post-rock bedrock of Jim Barr’s thundering bass lines, Adrian Utley’s sidewalk crunching guitar with a shadowing menace & the shuffling undercurrent of Seb Rochford, the percussive & rhythmic voice of Acoustic Ladyland, Polar Bear, Sons of Kemet & Patti Smith’s live band amongst many others.
137 are sure to shake St Mary’s Hall.
‘Tremble and bristle together like post-rockers Mogwai, had they cut their teeth on Weather Report and Barry Adamson’ Tariq Goddard, The Quietus.
Westport Sound 25 11th – 12th October 2025
info |
Tickets
Last Dream of the Morning – Saturday 11th October
Last Dream of the Morning is a trio of jazz & free improvised music heavyweights – saxophonist John Butcher, double bassist John Edwards & drummer Mark Sanders. Since the early 1980s, all three have explored rich & significant collaborations with a roll call of the greats in jazz & experimental music, from Spontaneous Music Ensemble and AMM’S Eddie Prévost to Fred Frith, Joe McPhee & Keiji Haino, to everyone in between. Last year John Butcher celebrated his 70th birthday at London’s Cafe OTO, a chance to appreciate a lifetime’s commitment to collaboration and musical exploration. As the New York City Jazz Record notes, Butcher has operated ’at the cutting-edge of improvisatory practice since the ‘80s. Whenever an acoustic musician starts to sound like a bank of oscillators, a tropical forest, a brook or an insect factory, Butcher’s influence is likely nearby’.
Mark Sanders is a celebrated & prolific drummer, playing with greats including Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Grimes & Evan Parker. John Edwards grew up in London & is deeply rooted in free jazz & improvisation. He is widely regarded as one of the great double bass players of his generation. A strutting intensity that acclaimed journalist Richard Williams observes as, ‘absolutely remarkable: there’s never been anything like him before, anywhere in jazz.’
‘all working at the very pinnacle of European improv…the level of rapport and collective virtuosity is astonishing.’ Daniel Spicer, Jazzwise.
Westport Sound 25 11th – 12th October 2025
info |
Tickets
Bryn Wyrd – Saturday 11th October
Bryn Wyrd is a Bristol based duo with strong Midlands roots. The collaboration between DIY stalwarts Anthony Brown (Repo Man / Iceman Furniss Quintet) on upright bass and Aron Ward (Harpoon / Repo Man) on electronics, drum machines and fx mangling forge a dense texture of entangled & taut, industrial techno-like pulses of distortion, pounding electronic physicality & dub concrète production with traces of early Warp-style IDM & hard strummed free jazz bass lines.
‘Lands somewhere pretty fresh and, by my reckoning, largely unoccupied’ Noel Gardner, The Quietus
Westport Sound 25 11th – 12th October 2025
info |
Tickets
The New Eves – Saturday 11th October
Brighton-based DIY quartet of folkloric punk & rock ’n’ roll. A crashing, ritualistic propulsion across cello, violin, flute, guitar, bass & drums. Indie hooks & wails with the motorik edge of The Velvet Underground, playful looseness of The Raincoats & agitated delivery of Patti Smith. After a festival highlight set at Green Man’s Rising Stage last year & an upcoming UK tour, End of the Road main stage festival appearance & debut album release, it’s a real coup to welcome them to Westport.
‘One of the most exciting debut albums of the year’ Rough Trade
The New Eves: meet the Brighton quartet with a mind-bending live set NME
Westport Sound 25 11th – 12th October 2025
info |
Tickets
Theo May’s New Odd Unit – Sunday 12th October
Malmesbury’s own prodigy, a hometown favourite with progressive vision & classical technique. Theo was born in the late 1990s and excited by his father’s love of jazz & extensive collection of music began to play the violin at 4 years old. Formal education came through the South West Music School in 2009, The Purcell School and then the Royal College of Music. Theo has an energetic, expansive practice immersed in jazz, free improvisation, folk & classical music, shaped & encouraged by the guiding light & support of Keith & Julie Tippett.
Theo May’s New Odd Unit emerges from the ashes of last year’s celebrated album Alive in the Forest of Odd. That quintet’s wild set of European folk, modal jazz & avant-garde compositions was released with a triumphant sold out hometown show & airplay on BBC Radio 3’s specialist jazz programme Round Midnight. Theo’s abundant energy, wide musical reach & renaissance style intensity suggests him to be something of a contemporary David Munrow.
Sunday lunchtime promises to be a blistering start to the day’s programme – wake the town & tell the people indeed.
‘an approach to music-making that takes such delight in the journey of a composition, travels across so many musical traditions and countries, and reaches out to explore novel ways of bringing familiar instruments together [with] a vision that is so all-embracing, enthusiastic, and warm’ Chris Barber, Jazz Views.
Westport Sound 25 11th – 12th October 2025
info |
Tickets
Dominic Lash & Heather Roche – Sunday 12th October
Dominic Lash is a double bassist, guitarist, author & film theorist. Heather Roche is a clarinetist, composer & academic. Together they play with great sensitivity and committed listening. Prolific & renowned collaborators, they have independently and collectively performed & recorded with Modern Nature, Angharad Davies, Alexander Hawkins, Steve Noble & Apartment House, among countless others.
They have performed internationally, participated in multiple residencies & festivals including Manchester Jazz Festival & Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Dominic performed with the late violinist Tony Conrad, recorded with Chris Corsano & had a solo double bass piece composed especially by Éliane Radigue. Heather has recorded 23 albums with Apartment House, performed with the London Symphony Orchestra & London Sinfonietta, premiered countless solo works for clarinet including a specially commissioned concerto performed at Glasgow’s Tectonics festival.
On Dominic, ‘a master of the extreme’ Paul Medley, Oxford Times
On Heather, ‘a figurehead for contemporary music performance practice’ – Neil Luck, BBC Radio 3
Westport Sound 25 11th – 12th October 2025
info |
Tickets
Milkweed – Sunday 12th October
A duo of voice, guitar & banjo shrouded in mystery despite the white light heat of a trio of celebrated cassette releases, 4* Guardian reviews & sold out shows across the UK. Milkweed describe themselves as ‘Slacker-trad’ and it’s certainly an apt description for their transatlantic live performance which leans into the grunge thrash dynamics & gear shifts of those halcyon Pavement days with fuzzed folk reworkings reminiscent of Amps For Christ & the lo-fi tape stretching of experimental hip hop trio cLOUDDEAD.
What the description doesn’t fully capture, is the densely original multimedia, intertextual exploration of hauntology, prehistory and folklore, referencing both Appalachian & British traditional music. A contemporary folk horror exposes the fault lines of historical rupture through spliced tapes and muddied melodies, washed up on a river’s shore or chopped up with pirate radio static. Amongst shredding banjo and a defiant voice akin to Lankum’s Radie Peat, Milkweed draws out the ghosts in the glitched, distressed echoes & shadows of their unearthed & disrupted source material. A tape spliced approach that holds something of a plunderphonics impulse, Milkweed’s work explores notions of artefacts & psychic lines as they reconstitute symbolism & storytelling.
‘Something new, something ancient and something on the wind. Mesmerising’ Sophie Parkes, Songlines.
Westport Sound 25 11th – 12th October 2025
info |
Tickets
Pat Thomas – Sunday 12th October
Pat Thomas modestly describes himself as ‘a traditional player who’s just open to things’, that openness has seen him celebrated as ‘one of Britain’s most distinctive pianists, as well as an electronics wizard and visionary composer’ (Stewart Smith, The Guardian). Pat is a virtuoso who has collaborated internationally for decades with improvising masters like Lol Coxhill & Derek Bailey to celebrated contemporary operators such as Thurston Moore & Moor Mother.
Of Antiguan heritage, unwilling to be bound by genre, race or class, Pat began playing on a cardboard piano before learning classically from 8 years old. He became a Sufi in 1990, drawn to the traditions of scholarship and social justice, and this spiritual and intellectual foundation informs his searching music. He is a pioneering historic presence in the Oxford Improvisers Collective & his energetic, wide open approach ranges from his 1997 solo debut Remembering: New Jazz Jungle, a wild sound of Amen-break drum’n’bass, mutant funk and post – Western atonality to playing in one of the great jazz quartets performing today – [Ahmed] – who imaginatively explore the music of double bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik.
It is a true honour to have Pat grace Westport Sound, twice, with a solo piano performance & then drawing Sunday to a close with the trio Shifa.
‘Thomas always seems supremely in command of his gift, and his playing, no matter how free and ready to tangle with abstraction, always carries a charge of authoritative exactitude.’ – The Jazz Mann
Westport Sound 25 11th – 12th October 2025
info |
Tickets
Shifa – Sunday 12th October
Shifa is a name taken from the Arabic word for healing, شفاء,
Pianist Pat Thomas, Saxophonist Rachel Musson & drummer Mark Sanders are some of the UK’s most experienced and active improvising musicians. The name Shifa reflects the trust & close listening interplay between them.
Ecliptic is their new album released on Discus following two acclaimed live recordings from London’s Cafe OTO & Oslo’s Blow Out Festival in 2019 (both on New York-based 577 Records). Pat Thomas is one of the great contemporary pianists. Rachel Musson is an extensive collaborator, a ‘free-improviser sensitive to melody-like narrative and dramatic pacing’ (John Fordham, The Guardian). Mark Sanders is a renowned drummer who has performed with a who’s who of jazz & experimental musicians and features on a staggering 220 (& counting) recordings. Last year’s performances at Westport Sound now sit amongst major festival appearances across Europe, Brazil & the UK’s WOMAD & Glastonbury.
‘True mind-meld…free-jazz [of the] highest order’ Mike Jurkovic, All About Jazz.
Westport Sound 25 11th – 12th October 2025
info |
Tickets
Many more acts to be confirmed for our two day festival. Stay tuned.
