Recent Projects
Scratch and Reflect
In Spring 2025 I led Scratch and Reflect, a 3 month community music project supporting practitioner wellbeing through developing impro/ spontaneous group composition practice. Supported by Gateshead Big Local, the project brought together poets, community musicians, composers, improvisers, music therapists, SEND specialist teachers, and psychotherapists in a spontaneous composition group inspired by the Scratch Orchestra and informed by creative music therapy approaches and other improvisational traditions. Digging deep into semi-structured improvisations over a series of weeks and developing work with instruments, voices, electronics and found sounds, Scratch and Reflect constituted a sustained creative enquiry into our interests, tendencies and the possibilities in developing a not-knowing, ‘barefoot' approach to collective improvisation, sparking collective and individual reflection and highlighting, for me, the power of peer-supported creative work over time as a key reparative practice for those in helping roles.
Sandpit
From 2025-26 I facilitated a group to support and create reparative space for music therapy practitioners and students in the north east. Based at the Nordoff and Robbins Music Therapy centre, this group was focused on spontaneous composition and ‘un-free improvisation’, drawing on my developing workshop practice drawing on aleatoric methods, live whole-group looping, lusory approaches (e.g. using hand games as the basis of spontaneous composition).
The Matron’s Lodge Improvisers
The MLI grew from a self-contained supportive space convened for the music therapists of the north east Nordoff and Robbins team into a broader group connecting with local improvisers, music leaders, arts students, composers, and other creative artists from different disciplines. Existing in various configurations from 2018 until 2023, the MLI group was a porous creative entity with a core of free improvisation, in which members cultivated deep listening and practitioners shared their approaches to free playing generously.