Pagoda Project plus Guinea Lane Saxophone Quartet

Paul Hutchinson, Karen Wimhurst and Hannah Cumming return to Whitchurch as PAGODA PROJECT. We are delighted they will be performing for us in the Parish Hall, after their previously planned gig in February had to be cancelled for medical reasons. 

Paul and Karen came together through their love of traditional music cut through with experimentation, boldness, humour and risk. Their first duo album Coracle had five-star reviews and led to them touring widely across UK and European Festivals. Both composers and improvisers, they now celebrate over twenty years of close collaboration and original music playing as a duo and with other bands and large-scale projects.

Expect ethereal to turn gutsy, passion to be tempered by a good laugh and a tide of improvisation which means no two evenings are ever the same.

Paul Hutchinson is a BBC Folk Award Best Live Artist nominee with Belshazzar’s Feast, a much-feted accordion player and teacher. He’s equally at home on the concert stage, playing dance tunes for enthusiastic revellers or running workshops. His previous collaborations with Hoover the Dog, Pagoda Project and The Maniacs produced albums and performances that drew five-star reviews.

Karen Wimhurst is a widely commissioned composer ranging from chamber works to music theatre and large-scale, collaborative productions. Eclectic in nature, her own distinctive music manifests diverse traditional and jazz influences alongside a strong grounding in contemporary classical music. Latest works include Synthetica, an online opera in collaboration with MoDiP; Heart of the Matter, a bijoux chamber opera for Bass and piano featuring in Tete a Tete opera festival 2024; Freedoms for mixed choir and cello; a Song for Dorset one of the featured composers in the lockdown A Song For Us project and Jump, a solo work for clarinets, insect and amphibian sounds, featured at the British Library event Small but Perfectly Formed hosted by Martha Kearney and touring 2024 with an accompanying video by film maker Sonia Killmann.

Paul and Karen are joined by Hannah Cumming, an enthusiastic and virtuosic fiddle-player and singer who performs with oomph and passion.

Guinea Lane Saxophone Quartet was founded in 2018 by four friends from very diverse musical backgrounds. In the last few years, they have followed the “road less travelled” and focussed on folk music of the British Isles, playing original, dynamic and idiosyncratic arrangements and have built a repertoire of wholly original pieces. Over the last year they have played events in Chippenham, Whitchurch, Sidmouth and Priston as well as numerous community events and concerts in Hampshire and Wiltshire. The members of the quartet are: Rob Bartholomew who plays Soprano, Barbara Dalton on Alto , Jude Jackson Tenor and Fiona Stamp playing Baritone.