Seventieth Birthday Tour For Mike Gibbs
Friday, February 28, 2003
Composer and bandleader Mike Gibbs turned 70 earlier this week and this milestone will be marked by a major tour next month featuring a band that includes former Gibbs student Bill Frisell, bassist Steve Swallow, drummer Adam Nussbaum, saxophonists Chris Hunter, Stan Sulzmann, Julian Siegel, trumpeters Henry Lowther, Gerard Presencer, Klaus Stötter, Derek Watkins, John Barclay, trombonists Jeremy Price, Andy Wood, Sarah Williams and Pete Beachill, and French horn Jim Rattigan.
The programme will include new arrangements and re-workings of Gibbs compositions. Born in what is now Zimbabwe Gibbs studied piano at an early age and took up the trombone as a teenager and moved from Africa to America where he studied at Berklee in Boston. He later made the move to the UK and recorded with Graham Collier, John Dankworth, Kenny Wheeler and Mike Westbrook in the late 1960s, releasing his first album Michael Gibbs in 1970. Some of his early records have been reissued in recent tears but Gibbs has also released more recent albums for the ACT and Provocateur labels, including the critically acclaimed Europeana. The dates for the tour are: Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester (2 Oct), The Sage, Gateshead, (3 Oct) St George’s Bristol (4 Oct), Cadogan Hall, London (5 Oct), and CBSO, Birmingham CBSO (6 Oct).