Blue-Eyed Hawk
Biographie Blue-Eyed Hawk
Blue-Eyed Hawk
Taking its name from a line in W.B. Yeats's poem Under the Moon, Blue-Eyed Hawk is a London-based quartet that brings a wide-open improv sensibility to its melodic and richly textured original material. The band - featuring four of the UK's most hotly tipped young performer/composers – formed in 2011 and creates highly charged and emotive music traversing art-rock, jazz, minimalist and electronic soundworlds.
Lauren Kinsella
is a London based vocalist and composer originally from Dublin. She has performed in venues across the UK, Hungary, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Norway and India. She sings and composes in many groups including Blue-Eyed Hawk, Thought-Fox and SnowPoet with bassist Chris Hyson.
She collaborates in duos with Swiss drummer Alex Huber, Loop collective pianist Dan Nicholls, and in a trio with cellist Hannah Marshall and trumpeter Nick Malcolm. She has released albums on WideEarRecords and Diatribe to critical acclaim and is the featured vocalist on ‘Island Mentality'; the Chaos Orchestra’s debut album. She performs with leading improvisers on the UK and European Jazz scenes including Yves Robert, Mark Sanders, Julian Siegel, Mark Lockheart, Chris Batchelor, Liam Noble and Hans Hassler.
Her work continues to be reviewed in several countries including the USA, Germany, the UK, France, Norway, Switzerland and Ireland and hailed as a ‘gifted young singer’ (John Fordham, Guardian) her music is broadcast on BBC Radio 3, Jazz FM, RTE Lyric FM and BBC Radio Scotland.
She was awarded The Kenny Wheeler Jazz Prize 2013 and teaches jazz voice at Leeds Conservatoire’s undergraduate programme.
Alex Roth
As a guitarist, composer, improviser, bandleader and interdisciplinary artist Alex Roth is carving out a unique place for himself within the UK's contemporary music scene. Drawing inspiration from dance, film, literature and visual art as well as a wide range of musical traditions, Alex works across the jazz, improv, contemporary classical, alternative folk and electronic music communities with some of the leading artists of his generation.
Many of Alex's compositions have been written for the ensembles he leads or co-leads: jazztronica quintet Otriad, electric guitar ensemble Guitarmageddon, electro-acoustic chamber ensemble Sefiroth, four-piece collective Blue-Eyed Hawk and an improvising duo with saxophonist Joe Wright. He also writes for and performs regularly with the Alice Zawadzki Band, Tom Millar Quartet and Chaos Orchestra among others.
Alex has played at many of the UK's most renowned venues such as Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre, the V&A museum and Royal Albert Hall. He has also toured across the US and Europe, and has been featured on radio stations including BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 3, BBC London, Jazz FM, Resonance FM, Hoxton FM, Shoreditch Radio, Radio Sveriges (Sweden), Radio 6 (Netherlands) and RTE Lyric FM (Ireland), as well as television soundtracks for BBC1, ITV and Channel 4.
A graduate of both Dartington College of Arts and the Royal Academy of Music, Alex has won many awards, including the Musicians Benevolent Fund's Emerging Excellence Award to develop his multimedia theatre production Arvoles Lloran por Lluvia, which was also named runner-up in the Deutsche Bank Awards for Creative Enterprises in Performance and Composition and subsequently supported by PRSF and Arts Council England. He received the 2011 Dankworth Prize for Jazz Composition and was shortlisted for a 2012 BASCA British Composer Award. In 2014 he was selected for the LSO Discovery Panufnik Scheme and the Serious Take Five scheme.
