Phil Minton


Phil Minton is a British avant-garde jazz/free-improvising vocalist and trumpeter.
Minton is a highly dramatic baritone who tends to specialize in literary texts: he has sung lyrics by William Blake with Mike Westbrook's group, Daniil Kharms and Joseph Brodsky with Simon Nabatov, and extracts from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake with his own ensemble. He sings on a Jimi Hendrix tribute album, belting out the lyrics in over-the-top fashion. Between 1987 and 1993 Minton toured Europe, North America, and Russia with Lindsay Cooper's Oh Moscow ensemble.
He is perhaps best known, however, for his completely free-form work, which involves "extended techniques" that can be as unsettling as they can be mesmerising. His vocals often include the sounds of retching, burping, screaming, and gasping, as well as childlike muttering, whining, crying and humming; he also has an ability to distort his vocal cords to produce two notes at once. As the DJ/poet Kenneth Goldsmith has described it,
Minton has worked with most of the improvising musicians in the European scene, but his most frequent improvising companions are the pianist Veryan Weston and the percussionist Roger Turner; Minton and Turner perform as a duo in the opera .

Discography

With the Tony Oxley Celebration Orchestra
With Mike Westbrook
  • Plays for the Record
  • Goose Sauce
  • Mama Chicago
  • Bright as Fire
  • The Paris Album
  • The Cortège
  • On Duke's Birthday
  • ''Off Abbey Road''