Roz Harding

///SUPERMOOD

Welcome to the ///SUPERMOOD

Roz’s debut album SUPERMOOD is an expression of her experience with Alexander Technique.

ROZ HARDING [SAX] MIKE OUTRAM [GUITAR] JIM BASHFORD [DRUMS]

SUPERMOOD is a project making modern music rooted in jazz. Compositions by Roz Harding, band sound by everyone. Since emerging in 2013 SUPERMOOD defined a captivating live sound ("Adventurous and moving" - Deirdre Cartwright). The music descibed as "fresh and imaginative" (Martin King - Smiths Academy Informer) is fuelled by improvisation, dramatic rhythms, movement and breath, raw textures and introspective melodies. Influences for Roz's music include Kate Bush, Bob Dylan, Frederick Alexander and his technique, Art Pepper, Jeff Buckley, Prince, Nick Drake, Manic Street Preachers and Jackie McLean.

"What really impresses is the way the group works together as a single entity with a common musical purpose, a focus on the material itself. Roz's tunes, such as Fifty-two fifty, If you could, Sun wish and Yesterday I was on time, have many angular rhythmic and harmonic moments but remain accessible to listeners. The transition from composed to improvised sections was often seamless and the whole thing sounded very fresh and imaginative, free from the bebop clichés and Trane-isms which - liberating though they are - can actually straightjacket many a fine player. The Vortex jazz crowd loved it and their appearance here was an unqualified success. Their future looks exciting." Martin King - Smiths Academy Informer

"Roz Harding can appear a reluctant leader compared to other saxophonists fronting their bands, but with this project she has a forum for her metier. What happens is that rather than make extended solo statements - with underlying support - she offers conversational fragments for the others to respond to; in turn her solo is shaped by the resulting fabric of sounds. Few saxophonists comes to mind as such truly dialectical improvisers (perhaps Sam Rivers and Ingrid Laubrock). This approach makes for a group resonance, a shifting dynamic equilibrium; one's eyes dart between the members trying to work out when she is leading and when she is following (perhaps a new riddle arises out of this! question: when is a soloist not a soloist, answer: Roz Harding). The spectacles of evolving scenes are both exciting and moving as prodigious techniques and craft skills are made to serve artistic creativity. Her combination of the aural and the visual makes for great entertainment besides great art; Roz is a textbook case that supports Dalacroze's idea. His eurhythmics, the art of interpreting music through bodily movements, stresses the aesthetic sense of musical structures. We get (warmly) to see her expressing her real-time musical-experiences as feelings, rather than get to abstract and intuit her demonstrating (coldly) her musical-knowledge." - Excerpt from Gary Bayley's 'Architecture and A Sense Of The City'.

///SUPERMOOD LIGHT SHOW

Sit inside the ///SUPERMOOD

In addition to her saxophone work, Roz has begun exploring the handmade visual art techniques of 1960's liquid light shows as a further expression of her music and need to improvise.