Eddie Prévost has practiced a musical life since the 1950s with an intensity of commitment, invention, and artistry such that the very meaning of the word ‘musical’ has been (and continues to be) called into question by (and through) it.  Prévost has not shied away from explicitly asking this question of music, nor of returning to it again and again.  Deeply rooted in the most significant developments of Western music throughout his life, he has not lapsed into a sterile critique-for-the-sake-of-critique, but remained at the coalface of inquisitive practice through the unstable yet nourishing relations of AMM, the weekly London workshop (now entering its 21st year), and alliances with various colleagues such as Evan Parker and John Butcher.  As a practitioner, Prévost has consistently attempted to hold himself to account, most evidently in the body of written work shaped by his musical experience.   Taken as a whole, the music and the writing blur the distinction between theory and practice, the cerebral and the visceral.  More than this, it should be noted that this musical theory-practice is the product of a working-class experience, pursued as a matter of self-definition, and in the absence of any meaningful market reward or state support.  Having established himself in the years before [Margaret] Thatcher [former Prime Minister of the UK] dealt the decisive blow against working-class self-determination, Prévost’s trajectory traces the possibility of music as a contribution to social life beyond the current media-entrepreneurial complex, whilst still refusing – with openness, ease, and joy – to abandon that possibility.  — Bio by Nathan Moore

Eddie Prévost sends this quote by Cornelius Cardew as a preparation for the audience to read:

“Informal ‘sound’ has a power over our emotional responses that formal ‘music’ does not, in that it acts subliminally rather than on a conscious cultural level. This is a possible definition of the area in which AMM is experimental. We are searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them. The search is conducted in the medium of sound and the musician […] is at the heart of the experiment.”

{From Cardew’s essay ‘Towards and Ethic of Improvvisation ‘ first published in his Treatrse Handbook, reprinted on ‘page 127, Cornelius Cardew A Reader, Copula, 2006.}