He is known as an innovator, forging new musics out of jazz and improvised music and a wide range of folk forms. Hyder formed Talisker and went on to make six albums with this pioneering Celtic jazz group.He toured and recorded with Japanese and Tibetan Buddhist monks, South American and South African musicians, and latterly Siberian performers including shamans.

He has run several specialist workshops in the UK,France, Italy, Germany, Holland and Finland and in Russian conservatoires(Moscow, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kyzyl).

Current projects include K-Space with Tim Hodgkinson and one of Tuva’s most prominent musicians, Gendos Chamzyryn; LaDolce Visa; Hoots and Roots, with Maggie Nicols; a duo with pianist Vladimir Miller; Raz3, Ghost Time, and a new all-Scottish updated version of Talisker.He is also completing an art-music installation with artist Duncan Higgins who has already exhibited a work based on his research in Solovki.

Photos, videos and tracks and information – www.kenhyder.co.uk

ken@hyder.demon.co.uk

Quotes -

“Ken Hyder's drumming always appears connected to the world beyond narrow musical concerns. It comes with a context, picking up on place, the past, people met and local practices.

“At the same time he favours strong, well-defined musical statements, entirely free from ornamental excess and fuss.”

Julian Cowley, The Wire

“He has provided a blueprint for the increasing number of European musicians who have been incorporating elements of folk music into their jazz.”

The Guinness Who’s Who of Jazz

"The music they unfold grabs the soul. It goes to the deepest levels, to the essentials. It's magisterial simplicity. You are gripped throughout - and the only regret is when it ends."

L'Alsace,reviewing Hoots and Roots at the Mulhouse festival

“Ina recent interview, Hyder remarked that shamanistic drumming has nothing to do with timekeeping; it is a means of accessing spiritual energy. Beyond all expectations, this recording actually touches that energy source - it is charged with visceral yet transcendent vibrations. Simply awesome."

Bill Tilland, BBC on K-Space

“Every moment is spellbinding. The resulting sonic landscape would be a muddle without brilliant compositional aesthetics at work.

"When beats emerge, they are temporary, disjunctive and almost immediately absorbed again into the miasmic swirls, poignantly beautiful and somehow unsettling."

Marc Medwin, Dusted Magazine (USA) on K-Space

“Their music can call on the powerful directness of Albert Ayler or the open conversational abstractions of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble with equal ease. Vladimir Rezitsky is constantly driving the three with his slightly acidic tone and sharp, probing phrasing. Hyder's stuttering, free percussion splashes along, carrying the improvisations forward with a propulsive, open momentum.

“Vladimir Miller plays with stabbing clusters that break across the other two voices;fitting in perfectly between the alto player's forceful edge and the percussionist's sense of open space.

“This is music that demands careful listening and delivers with playing informed by passion and dynamic energy.”

Cadence

“Cool and quiet? One anticipates something from the Arvo Part stream of contemplation, but this evocation of the Solovki Archipelago in the White Sea is cantankerously hot and bothersome. Two Russians, Vladimir Miller (piano) and Vladimir Rezitsky (alto), meet a touchy old drummer from the Grampians: Ken Hyder. Beautifully played – free music of dignity, ferocity and eloquence, and pretty timeless at that. Good notes by Mr Hyder.”

Richard Cook, the Wire

“Hyder has one of the strongest strokes in jazz,deployed with an astonishing technique. Not for a moment does his polyrhythmic machine falter, his four limbs continuing to beat with an implacable precision”

Oest France

“Hyder's now long-standing involvement intrans-Siberian, shamanic music comes across in hauntingly vocalised passages and in his remarkably open-minded and uncluttered sense of musical space.”

Penguin book of Jazz

“He propels his players with a frenzied energy and passion that’s breathtaking.”

Fanfare, New York

"Briton Ken Hyder has been incorporating elements of Scottish and Celtic folk music into his playing in a most original fashion."

Jo Berendt, The Jazz Book

"The combination of stately minor-key melodies, droning basses, and loose flurries of percussion will certainly appeal to Ayler fans, but it is truly an incarnation of folk music from all over the world, an integration of Scottish,African and African-American traditions. This is a fine introduction to Hyder's work"

Clifford Allen, All About Jazz on there-release of his first album

Ken Hyder's Talisker

Dreaming of Glenisla

(Reel Recordings)

“Sonic deluges of grandeur burst forth from this sublime record, first birthed in 1975by the Scottish free-improv drum shaman Ken Hyder and blessedly resurrected this year by a new label out of Dundas, Ontario. Dedicated to reissuing long lost gems on disc, Reel Recordings is using pioneering techniques to infuse digital audio with the all the warmth and lifelike playback heard on original analog tapes.

“It's a noble effort, especially in the service of captivating works of beauty like Dreaming of Glenisla. Hyder's debut, it sounds for all the world like an Albert Ayler album released post-New Grass when the tenor alchemist was experimenting with a woodwind contraption called the chanter—the blown portion of Scottish highland bagpipes.

“Thetwin sax / twin bass lineup of Hyder's quintet creates a droning, cantatorial spirit sound one can imagine as the sound of Ayler's dreams.”

Doug Schulkind's Favorites of '07 - WFMU Give The Drummer Some

Raz CD

“Lu Edmonds played guitar with The Damned, The Mekons and Public Image Limited. He was also a founder member of breezy Balkan tribute outfit 3 Mustaphas 3. Now he's in improvising with drummer Ken Hyder and clarinettist Tim Hodgkinson, the three of them indulging their shared enthusiasm for cultures around and beyond the Black Sea.

“Each brings their varied travellers' tales to the music of Raz3 and through it they relay some entertaining anecdotes. Edmonds plucks and bows what seems to be a Turkish lute. Hodgkinson wails, sputters and growls through a metallic clarinet. The result is an agreeable, idiosyncratically accented session that's authentically located on London's Balham High Road and imaginatively situated on the shores of Lake Baikal.”

JulianCowley

BardoState Orchestra with Tibetan monks

“Their combination of Tibetan chant and free improvisation produces music that makes your hair stand on end. This is not an idolising of eastern appearances - but a collective journey through sound.”

JazzNu (Holland)

“This approach is truly original. I must say that I have not previously heard such moods and expression - this music dwell sat the level of richness that is quite unheard of.”

ImproJazz – France

“K-Space's Bear Bones is one of those rare beasts, a productive and respectful collaboration between western musicians and those from another culture. It sees UK improvisors Tim Hodgkinson (ex-Henry Cow) and Ken Hyder teaming up with Tuvan shaman Gendos Chamzyryn, whom they met on an extended expedition to explore the sonic aspects of shamanism in the mid-90s. Recorded in Siberia and elsewhere between 1996 and 2001, it shows that Hodgkinson and Hyder's groundwork paid off.

“OnBear Bones they neither co-opt Chamzyrn as exotic garnish to their existing music, nor do they go native and attempt to play totally in Tuvan style.Instead, the music takes account of the traditions each musician brings to the collaboration and fuses them to produce something new in which the musicians improvise with real understanding of each other's musical culture.

“It also carries with it some sense of the experiences Hyder and Hodkinson had of the extremely strange fringe technology of Kozyrev's Mirrors at a research institute in Siberia. An abstruse device which I will not pretend to understand, Kozyrev's Mirrors can reputedly warp space and time and induce telepathic experiences akin to shamanic journeys. What is amazing is how well Bear Bones works.

“Byturns scary, humorous, rhythmic and abstract, it is a truly stunning piece ofwork, unique, powerful and infused with a deep sense of shamanic otherness.”

Ian Simmons reviewing Bear Bones for nthposition

"Who knows, but that here we may be catching glimpses of a whole new direction - not just cultural, but philosophical - for improvisation?"

Bear Bones review in Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD

“Sham’s CD - Burghan Interference - sensitively weaves Siberian influences into the tapestry of improv. Hyder’s faraway vocal cries and sparing use of khoomei overtone style have an evocative, unpolished field recording quality, and he conjures further space with his light-touch cymbal play and skittering drum patterns.

“Hodgkinson’s alto sax is persuasively querulous on ‘Make Better Shake’, and the steely twang and abrasive strums of his flat-guitar suggest a stripped down, primordial rock.

“Wonderfully paced, atmospheric improv by a first rate duo.”

ChrisBlackford, The Wire

“‘Siberia… jazz … shamanism’, it says on the cover, and that’s exactly what you get.What’s fascinating about this is that most reasonably open-eared listeners to improvised music can simply take such ideas in their stride these days.

“The two musicians here knit their own improvisational ideas into the music of the difficult end of Russia.

“Hyder’s interest in combining jazz and folk forms is of course legendary, but this duooffers a mixture of the one-time Cowster’s instruments and Hyder’s disconcertingly authentic-sounding shamanic vocalising in a style which seems to take the histories of the various musics involved and turn them inside-out,with Hyder also somehow managing to remain a jazz drummer throughout.

“The music is sometimes dense, sometimes spacious, but never dull, and comes highly recommended to anyone interested in taking a different set of improvisational parameters on board.”

RogerThomas, Jazz Review (on the CD Burghan Interference)

“Morethan a concert – a total ritual gesture of extraordinary intensity.”

LaVanguaria, Spain

"THE GOOSE share a common and studious interest in Siberian shamanic music, and although the four improvisations are non-idiomatic in character, something ofthe mysterious, incantatory presence of the shaman is discernible throughout.In its higher register, Valentina Ponomareva's voice leaps across vast imaginary landscapes; Hyder builds the rhythmic tension and Hodgkinson produces exotic bird-like cries. This is fertile terrain for the intrepid explorer."

JazzMagazine, UK