Review: Alan Tomlinson and The River Seven, Dale Head Farm, Rosedale, North York Moors (From York Press)

Review: Alan Tomlinson and The River Seven, Dale Head Farm, Rosedale, North York Moors

9:53am Tuesday 23rd March 2010 in

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HOW did you spend your Sunday? How about driving for an hour into ever hardier Yorkshire country; following intermittent improvised signs to the River Seven, down the narrowest of moorland lanes; then watching cars being pushed up a muddy incline to park in a field, before a cross-country trek to a babbling brook.

Why? To see one man and his trombone in the world premiere of his improvised half-hour musical duet with the Seven’s waters, and your reviewer was not alone. Around 100 adults, children, a man from Oxford and cameramen too, had been drawn to the latest live art happening conjured by The Shed’s visionary Simon Thackray.

Glory be, the rain had taken the morning off; instead spring sunshine glinted on Alan Tomlinson’s trombone as he took to the river in waders, summer jacket and woollen hat, while Aron Flintoff, the sound man with the cockerel crown of punk-red spikes, crouched on the bank, his microphone following Tomlinson’s every jagged jazz move.

No bird song could be heard – “I’ve got rid of a few audiences in my time, but birds, that was a first,” Tomlinson said later – as he interacted with the water’s steady tinkling flow, in a series of broken bursts, blasts, squawks and squeaks and whispers, even removing the slide to blow bubbles at the river’s surface.

Alternative water music over, it was time for a Shed Load of soup, cream teas and Shed bitter on tap at the specially opened Dale Head Farm tea garden. Eccentric England at its Sunday best.