Maggie Nicols

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Maggie Nicols (2007)

Maggie Nicols (* 24. February 1948 as Margaret Nicholson in Edinburgh ) is a Scottish jazz singer ( Free Jazz , New improvised music ) and dancer . "With her warm, soft voice", according to Martin Kunzler , she can switch seamlessly "between melody, sound, noise and language" and "combine the demands of free improvisation and song-like". The critic Rainer Köhl pointed out that it is also an art used individually by Maggie Nicols, "to comment on her own actions, that of her musician partners or the audience, very spontaneously musically: wonderfully ironic, highly virtuoso."

Live and act

Nicols left school at the age of 15 and began to work as a dancer (including at the Moulin Rouge ). She then also sang in nightclubs and began working with the bop pianist Dennis Rose. In 1968 she went to London and became a member of John Stevens " Spontaneous Music Ensemble " as Maggie Nichols (together with Trevor Watts and Johnny Dyani ) and also performed with the group at the first Total Music Meeting in Berlin . Around 1970 she held vocal workshops at the Oval House Theater in London, where she also appeared in several independent theater productions. Shortly thereafter, she became a member of Keith Tippett's large-format " Centipede, " where she first worked with Julie Tippetts . With her, Phil Minton and Brian Ely, she founded the vocal quartet Voice . At the same time she began working with drummer Ken Hyder and his group Talisker ; with Hyder she later entertained the duo Hoots and Roots , which also reflected Scottish folk music .

In the late 1970s she and Lindsay Cooper founded the Feminist Improvising Group , which performed successfully across Europe. She was also the organizer of a multi-media performance group Contradictions that began in 1980. Together with the pianist Irène Schweizer and the bassist Joëlle Léandre , she has been working together in the Trio Les Diaboliques since the 1980s . She formed a duo with pianist Pete Nu; She played in a trio with avant-garde artists Charlotte Hug and Caroline Kraabel as well as with Pinguin Moschner and Joe Sachse . In the early 1990s she was a member of the Dedication Orchestra . At the Moers Festival she performed alone in a solo concert. She regularly works with a large improvisation workshop, The Gathering . She also toured with Cats Cradle and Sean Bergin's song Mob (with Han Bennink , Minton and Michael Moore ). In recent years she has also appeared in the Trio Blurb Trio Blurb with John Russell and Mia Zabelka , in a duo with musicians such as Phil Hargreaves, Mandhira de Saram or Peter Urpeth and with the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra . Together with the Berlin trio I am Three & Me ( Silke Eberhard , Nikolaus Neuser , Christian Marien ) she also interprets songs by Charles Mingus .

Maggie Nicols (center) performing with Trio Blurb at the Vortex Jazz Club in London (2011)

Nicols has worked on numerous other projects. On the one hand, she is interested in the radical expansion of the vocal possibilities of expression and combines these textually and scenically with depictions of everyday women and tap dancing , on the other hand, Nicols also likes to sing melodic songs.

literature

  • Julie Dawn Smith: Perverse Hysterics: The Noisy Cri of Les Diaboliques . In: Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies . Duke University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8223-4320-2 , pp. 180–209 ( google.com [accessed January 4, 2015]).

Lexical entries:

Web links

Commons : Maggie Nichols  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Martin Kunzler: Jazz Lexicon. Volume 2: M-Z. (= rororo non-fiction book. Volume 16513). 2nd Edition. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-499-16513-9 , p. 946.
personal data
SURNAME Nicols, Maggie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nichols, Maggie; Nicholson, Margaret (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish singer (jazz, new music) and dancer
DATE OF BIRTH February 24, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Edinburgh