Simon Limbrick (left) & Paul Archibald

The world of percussion offers us a variety of sounds, colours and musical styles with instruments that are unique to individual countries and regions requiring skills that take many years to acquire.

A programme of music that combines such a sound world with the distinctive voice of the trumpet offers to the listener an exciting and unusual musical experience. All the programmes divised for this duo include a wide range of instruments in a repertoire that is stimulating and often quite theatrical!

The enormous variety in shape and sound of these families of instruments - from Latin American to Indian and African - can be musically and visually both stimulating and challenging. The flexibility of the repertoire allows the performers to offer programmes that include jazz-based works such as Chet Baker improvisations and contemporary works specifically written for trumpet and percussion instruments.

Sample programme
Simon Limbrick	Rimshot	for solo snare
Marcel Bitsch	Cinque Etudes	trumpet and percussion
Chet Baker	Improvisations:	Don't Explain All the things you are You can't go home again
interval
Edward Shipley	Old Battlefields	trumpet and percussion
Peter Mc Garr	Sweet Steel Alone	for solo tenor pan
Cecilia McDowall	Cool it	trumpet and percussion

Andre Jolivet wrote a momentous work, Heptade, for the French virtuoso Maurice Andre and, more recently, Cecilia McDowall has written a work for Paul and Simon, Cool It, that is influenced by Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story.

Simon Limbrick's involvement in music embraces performance, composition and educational workshops. He contributed as a member of the cult systems orchestra The Lost Jockey and Man Jumping, recording various albums for EG Editions and creating scores for leading dance companies, Second Stride and London Contemporary Dance.
He has created pieces for Mary Wiegold’s Songbook, Ensemble Bash, Endymion Ensemble and the Brighton Youth Orchestra and was composer-in-residence at Blackheath Concert Halls in 95|96. Compositions created for him include works by Javier Alvarez, Brian Elias (Kenneth MacMillans last ballet The Judas Tree), Vic Hoyland and Andrew Poppy. He has performed the world-premieres of solo pieces by James Dillon, Frederic Rzewski and Claude Vivier. He is currently commissioning a series of chamber works for percussion and chamber ensemble from composers Hans Werner Henze, John Woolrich, Philip Cashian, Harry de Wit and Howard Skempton. A solo CD , "Steam", of Simon performing his own compositions was released in Autumn 1999 and his latest CD "Debris", was released in November 1999.

In 1990 Simon completed his MA in Electroacoustic Composition at City University. He performs with the Nash Ensemble, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Endymion Ensemble and Composers' Ensemble and has performed as a soloist for radio and television.

Simon has performed many world premieres including works by James Dillon, Andrew Poppy and Frederic Rzewski and regularly commissions new work. As a composer he has created pieces for various artists including Ensemble Bash and Roger Heaton and has released two CDs of his own compositions Steam and Debris.