In 1994 English percussionist Chris Cutler was asked by the organisers of the 25th Frankfurt Jazz Festival in Germany as to whether he had a project for the event. Cutler said "yes" and took the opportunity to try out a new musical idea involving "real-time montaging" that he had been contemplating. He used the festival's generous budget to form a quintet of musicians from around the world. Billed as "The Chris Cutler Project" before there was time to give it its name, p53 consisted of Cutler, German classical pianist Marie Goyette, Polish classical pianist and composer Zygmunt Krauze, German composer and performer Lutz Glandien, and Japanese composer and multi-instrumentalist Otomo Yoshihide. p53's performance at the Frankfurt Jazz Festival was filmed and later broadcast several times on German television. An album of the concert called p53 was also released by Recommended Records in 1996. In May 1997 p53, with the same lineup, performed for the second time at the Angelica International Festival of contemporary music in Bologna in Italy. An extract from this performance appeared on the Angelica 1997 compilation CD. The orchestral version was first performed in November 2006, in Glasgow, with the BBCScottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ilan Volkov. Volkov also conducted it in Bologna in 2014, at the Angelica Festival with the Orchestra del Teatro Communale, where the soloists were Daan Vandewalle and Thomas Dimuzio. A chamber version of the piece was performed at the Techtonics festival in Tel Aviv in November 2014, with soloists Maya Dunietz, Tim Hodgkinson and Chris Cutler, under the direction of Ilan Volkov.
Music
The instrumentation of the original p53 project consisted of two grand pianos, amplified turntables, a homemade electric guitar, percussion, electronics and real time processing. One of the pianists was instructed to play "a few small sections from the classical repertoire", in any way and at any tempo, while the other musicians were free to improvise around them, under certain dramaturgical rules. Glandien periodically played back amplified and distorted live samples of the pianists.
Name
The group's name was taken from the p53 tumour suppressing gene that was discovered in 1979 by David P. Lane and others. Because of its role in preventing cancer, the gene has been described as "the guardian of the genome"
Members
;1994 and 1997 lineup
Chris Cutler – drums, objects, low grade electronics