Ward, Alex – Grantham musician played with Duke Ellington

Alex Ward (b1974)

FORMER King’s School pupil Alex Ward lived in Lodge Way, Grantham, as a youngster.

While there he was invited in 1989 to appear at the Glasgow International Jazz Festival, by top guitarist Derek Bailey, joining such luminaries as the Duke Ellington Orchestra and Humphrey Lyttelton.

By the age of 15, he had already appeared at Leicester Haymarket Theatre, Old Vic at Nottingham and London’s Festival Hall and was already a talented clarinettist as well as adept on piano and synthesiser.

He took up the clarinet aged nine, and became a regular at Grantham Music Festival.

He is now a highly regarded composer, improviser, and performing musician. His primary instruments are clarinet and guitar, and he has also performed in public and on recordings on alto sax, piano/keyboards, bass guitar, and vocalist.

He was based in Oxford from 1992-2000, and since then has lived in London.

His involvement in freely improvised music dates back to 1986, when he met the guitarist Derek Bailey. As an improviser, he was initially principally a clarinettist (sometimes also playing alto sax), but since 2000 he has also been active as an improvising guitarist.

Both as a clarinettist and guitarist, hIs longest-standing collaborations in the field of improvised music have been with the drummer Steve Noble.

From 1993 to 2001, most of his activity as a composer took place in collaboration with Benjamin Hervé, mainly in the context of the rock band Camp Blackfoot. From 2002-2005, his writing was mostly done solo, and was primarily focused on songs. Since 2006, he has been heavily involved in both solo and collaborative composition, predominantly (though not exclusively) of instrumental music.

His main writing and performance vehicle during this time has been Dead Days Beyond Help, a duo with drummer Jem Doulton. Other bands he currently leads include Predicate and Alex Ward & The Dead Ends.

He has been a member of many other groups including ensembles led by Eugene Chadbourne, Simon H. Fell and Duck Baker, and has also done considerable work as a session musician and in collaboration with other media.

His current work includes the avant-rock duo Dead Days Beyond Help in which he plays guitar, sings and co-writes the material; various groups which perform his compositions-for-improvisers including Forebrace, the Alex Ward Quintet/Sextet, and the Item series of ensembles (the first of which, Item 10, debuted at Cafe Oto in September 2017); and improvising collaborations both regular and ad-hoc with musicians including Steve Noble, Dominic Lash, Kay Grant, Joe Morris and Weasel Walter. 

Besides his own groups and improvisational work, he also performs in ensembles including the Duck Baker Trio/Quartet, Thurston Moore’s recent multi-guitar projects Galaxies and New Noise Guitar Explorations, and Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward’s This Is Not This Heat. 

He brings a unique energy and inventiveness to all these projects, elevating them far above the ordinary and injecting them with a thrilling sense of danger and possibility.

Much of his work is documented on the label Copepod, which he has co-run with Luke Barlow since 2005.