Iain Ballamy Quartet - Riversphere

Award-winning British saxophonist and composer with a worldwide reputation and whose musical interests embrace both jazz and music from cultures around the globe. Renowned in Europe as the "Fantastic Englishman", Ballamy established himself playing alongside notables including Hermeto Pascoal, the late Gil Evans, George Coleman, Dewey Redman, Mike Gibbs and the New York Composers Orchestra. His distinctive saxophone voice can be heard in his improvisations for the BBC Radio 4 play 'Signal to Noise' by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, the movie 'Legend' and a documentary 'Joseph Losey - the Man with Four Names'. Ballamy also scored the award winning film 'Mirrormask' directed by Dave McKean for the Jim Henson company.

Winner of the 2016 "Kenny Wheeler Jazz Prize", awarded to one Royal Academy of Music graduate of exceptional ability each year, guitarist Rob Luft has already worked with some of the highest profile artists on the UK jazz scene. He's toured Europe with his own "Deco Ensemble" and is a member of several bands including Byron Wallen's "Four Corners", has performed with Gregory Porter, Hamish Stuart & Liane Carroll, and came in second in the 2016 Montreux Jazz Guitar competition. His debut album, “Riser”, was released in July 2017, to widespread critical acclaim from the European jazz media. John Fordham wrote in The Guardian that it’s a “very sophisticated debut, but given Luft’s old-soul achievements since his early teens, we should have heard it coming”.

Corrie’s prowess as a unique, emotionally sophisticated composer has been paramount to his diverse original/co-lead projects including power-jazz quartet Blue-Eyed Hawk and songwriter-influenced Little Lions, but here his uninhibited style has flourished to new levels. Corrie has penned a rich diversity of contemporary folk melodies reminiscent of Celtic traditions and at times North African music and arranged them in a perfectly flowing series of modern-day anthems.