Peter Urpeth is a pianist and composer who for more than thirty years has worked in jazz and free improvisation. He currently offers a quartet with Terry Day, Olie Brice and Ntshuks Bonga, and a duet with singer, Maggie Nicols. On-going projects feature guitarist Mark Hewins.

New Recording Releases

Two Duets - Peter Urpeth / Roger Turner

Peter Urpeth - piano / Roger Turner - percussion - Two Duets - a full length album available on Bandcamp…Recorded at The Vortex, Dalston, London, 2018. Released June 2020.

Wrappers by MakeShift

This is the first recording release since there late 1980s by MakeShift - Stuart Wilding - cello / percussion / lap harp; Nick Smith - percussion / electronics; Geoff Collins - saxophone/ digital sax / electronics; Peter Urpeth - piano / iOS instruments / production / sound processing.

MakeShift were established as one of the most interesting experimental music groups working in London in the 1980s. The quartet have remained close friends and collaborators on other projects, but the pandemic lockdown enabled the group to find a new way of working, and a new energy to create. Wrappers is the first evidence of that productivity in difficult times..

Released June 2020

Meditation for Ken Hyder

A meditation on samples of shamanic chanting and percussion by the great Ken Hyder, using granular and other modular synthesis. Released May 2020

Wraith Island (FMR CD)

Peter Urpeth (Piano), Terry Day (Drums), Olie Brice (Bass) Ntshuks Bonga (Saxes)

reviews…

Free spirits invoke the plight of the dispossessed

By Chris Searle, Morning Star

IT’S a long way from Johannesburg to Hackney and when Ntshuks Bonga arrived in 1970 as a seven-year-old refugee from apartheid to live in London, I wonder if he ever envisaged that he would be playing alto saxophone some four decades on in a local jazz venue.
But that’s exactly where he ended up at Cafe Oto. Ntshuks was guest horn with the free-spirited trio of pianist Peter Urpeth, bassist Olie Brice and percussionist Terry Day.
As Day’s light brushwork and Brice’s sonorous, jumping beat unified with Urpeth’s gutturally super-rapid forays up and down his keys, Bonga’s battery of acerbic, vibrating and plunging cadences screeched and howled from his saxophone.
These were intensely free sounds, with the listener’s ways of hearing as creative as the inventions of the musicians. Urpeth is a tempestuous pianist, whose free thoroughfares of notes head in multiple directions simultaneously, while Brice’s pounding bass made the Balls Pond Road shake and Day tapped his drums with the thinnest of sticks, sparklers of sound.
As for Ntshuks, his addition to the trio sounded to me like the cries of the dispossessed, the uprooted or those forced to seek shelter in the bomb-ravaged cellars of their world. A million lives poured from his urgent horn — rasping, gravelly, adenoidal and powerfully defiant as one free collective sequence flowed into the next — and we heard the voices of the oppressed and jeopardised, with the insufferable cries of their children.
All this from four London free troubadours, improvising in a converted Victorian warehouse in Dalston and, as Ntshuks’s horn pealed like a nesting bird during the opening of the second piece, you knew that this was music that could fly anywhere and find immediate connection to humans living their lives in all the desperate places of our planet. 

DownTown Music Gallery, New York:

WRAITH ISLAND [PETER URPETH / OLIE BRICE / NTSHUKS BONGA / TERRY DAY] - Live at Cafe Oto (FMR 439; UK) Wraith Island is Ntshuks Bonga on alto & soprano sax, Peter Urpeth on piano, Olie Brice on bass and Terry Day on drums. Similar to The Stone, Cafe Oto and Vortex, are the two main places where creative music thrives in London, throughout the year. This quartet combines four musicians from different scenes and sounding like they have been together for a long time. South African born saxist Ntshuks Bonga has been working with Louis Moholo for the past few years and does have that Township sound in his playing. I’ve just become familiar with pianist Peter Urpeth recently as he has two discs on FMR, one, a duo with Maggie Nicols and the other performing the music of John Cage. Bassist Olie Brice seems to be all over in recent years: he has a recent discs as a bandleader plus he has worked with Ingrid Laubrock, Paul Dunmall and Mikolaj Trzaska. Drummer Terry Day was the founding member of the People Band (existed way back in 1968-1970), as well as Alterations, legendary British improv band with a twisted sense of humor whose members included Steve Beresford & David Toop.
I listened to this long (79 minute) disc in its entirety earlier this week and was amazed by how consistently engaging it was. There are four quartet and two duet pieces. Whoever recorded this, did a great job as the sound is perfect. I really the sound of Mr. Ntshuks alto sax which is somewhere between Ornette, Thomas Chapin & John Zorn: intense, spiraling fragments quickly woven into tight lines. I doubt anyone would be able to figure out who any these men were in a blindfold test but I must admit that I was blown away throughout! - Bruce Lee Gallanter, DMG 

Other Worlds (FMR CD)

Maggie Nicols (Voice) Peter Urpeth (Piano)

Speech (FMR CD) - The Silence Ensemble perform pieces by John Cage

Review:

Downtown Music Gallery, New York…

The three piece here were recorded during a festival to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of composer/philosopher John Cage on the Isle of Lewis, a remote island 50 miles northwest of Scotland. Each of the three pieces deal with silence and the transmission of sounds, based on neutral frameworks, which will sound different depending on the locations. “Radio Music” is performed by 5 performers, each with their own radio. The results are several layers of static and other odd radio transmissions, electronic ghosts expanding, contracting, becoming more or less dense. The overall sound is somehow fascinating, yet the questions remain: is it music and/or does it matter? “Imaginary Landscape No. 5” for any 42 recordings and was put together by Peter Urpeth who used the I Ching (like Cage did earlier) to help select the recordings bought at Charity Shop in the UK. Things move more quickly as he samples snippets of different records (Gaelic music, pop music, etc.). “Speech” is the longest piece here at 42 minutes and consists of one speaker reading local texts with five radio performers. There are layers of voices and static interwoven at times, in-between silent sections. Repeated phrases, far off ghost-like voices, distant distorted sounds, a calm voice up front discussing the ‘Fishing News’… This piece reminds me of “Revolution Number Nine” by the Beatles, which was indeed influenced by Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. Which makes perfect sense. This disc has a certain Cage-ian sound/world which is most effective at transporting us somewhere else far away. - Bruce Lee Gallanter, DMG

Some early work…

2009 at The Vortex, Dalston London with Phil Wachsmann, violin, John. Russell, guitar and me, piano…