US musician and Fluxus member Ben Patterson died on 25 June at his home in Wiesbaden, Germany. He was 82 years old.

Patterson was born in Pittsburgh in 1934. He studied at the University of Michigan between 1952–56. As a double bassist he played with Halifax Symphony Orchestra, The Seventh Army Symphony and Ottawa Philharmonic Orchestra, before moving to Cologne in 1960. Over the next two years he performed in Paris, Venice and Vienna. Most significantly, he also participated in the first Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik (or Fluxus International Festival Of Very New Music) in Wiesbaden, in September 1962, alongside key participants such as Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Emmett Williams, Alison Knowles and Philip Corner. At the event, Patterson performed his recently composed Variations For Double Bass – involving plastic butterflies, rope made from rags, and pieces of wire. “In another variation I use a stomach pump to rid the instrument of any foreign bodies,” he once said, as quoted in Julian Cowley’s Fluxus Primer in The Wire 230.

In 1965 Patterson returned to New York where he took a 20 year public break from music. He returned to the scene in 1987, holding his first solo exhibition at Emily Harvey Gallery in New York.

Ben Patterson and Keith Rowe performing at the 15th Annual LMC concert at the ICA London December 2006.

Incubate has announced the first set of names for its annual festival coming up in September. Happening at its usual home of Tilburg in the Netherlands, this year’s event will run over three weekends instead of one. Artists confirmed so far include Deerhoof, Yob, Cult Of Dom Keller, Kayo Dot, Black Cobra, Shackleton, and others. In addition to its programme of music, visual arts and film, Wire Deputy Editor Joseph Stannard will be hosting talks.

Glasgow’s Glad Cafe has programmed a weekender to celebrate its fourth birthday. Showcasing “local and international talent” at various venues across the city’s Southside, the three day event is co-curated by Counterflows, Save As Collective, Alasdair Roberts and Wire contributor Alex Neilson. Confirmed acts include Neilson’s Trembling Bells, Sound Of Yell, Brigid Mae Power, Guttersnipe, Mary Hampton, Ashtray Navigations, The Family Elan, Mick Flower, Stephanie Hladowski, Bill Nace, Jake Meginsky, and more. Glorious Traces: The Glad Weekender runs from 12–14 August.

13 July would have been the 80th birthday of the great free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, who was found dead in New York's East River in November 1970. The South London arts space DIY Space For London and its in house record shop Tome Records are marking the date with an event called Mystic Tenor.

The event will include screenings of two films: Michael Snow's iconic 1964 experimental short New York Eye And Ear Control, for which Ayler's group provided the soundtrack; and Kasper Collins's acclaimed 2006 documentary My Name Is Albert Ayler. As well as the screenings, Custodians Of The Realm, a trio of Adam Bohman and saxophonists Adrian Northover and Sue Lynch, will perform a set based on Ayler's music.

Full details are available on DIY Space For London's website.

This September, Brighton Alternative Jazz Festival returns for its second instalment. Run by The Wire’s Daniel Spicer, the festival offers “left-field improvisation and deep jazz for those in the know, and those keen to learn.” Acts announced include The Artifacts Trio featuring Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid and Mike Reed, Ingrid Laubrock & Tom Rainey, Sophie Agnel, Steve Noble & John Edwards, Bourne Davis Kane with Paul Dunmall, Konstrukt with Alexander Hawkins, and more.

As with last year’s successful bid, the festival needs to raise £3000 to access funding promised by the Arts Council. An indiegogo campaign has been set up, with exclusive merchandise, early bird tickets and a chance to sit in the VIP area all among the items on offer. Plus, on 7 July Brighton The Verdict will host an evening of improv featuring Cath Roberts, Peter Marsh, Paul May, Ian Brighton, Seth Bennett, Anton Hunter, Tom Ward and In Threads, with all proceeds going towards the fest.

Brighton Alternative Jazz Festival will take place 9–11 September at The Old Market.

Former Wire Editor Mark Sinker has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the publication of a companion book to the rock writing conference he chaired at Birkbeck College in 2015. Called A HIDDEN LANDSCAPE ONCE A WEEK: how UK music-writing became a space for unruly curiosity, in the words of those who made it happen, it will include selected extracts from the conference’s panel debates, alongside essays from participating writers whose back pages cover the wide spread of newsprint weeklies, monthly magazines and journals in circulation during the period under focus at Birkbeck: Val Wilmer, David Toop, Tony Stewart, Bob Stanley, Cynthia Rose, Edwin Pouncey, Penny Reel, Liz Naylor, Mark Pringle, Tony Palmer, Paul Morley, Beverly Glick (aka Betty Page), Simon Frith, and others.

“Once upon a time – for a surprisingly long time – the UK music press was a lot more than just the place to catch up with singles or album release news, with interviews with chart-topping figures and the antics of gobby rockstars,” declares Sinker. “Week on week in its heyday – the mid 60s to the early 80s – a young reader could also go to it to find out about everything from comics to cult films to radical politics, as well as an extremely wide range of non-chart musics from all over the world. This anthology is a companion volume to the conference, of memories and commentary, conversation and critique, combining extracts from the 2015 panels with informed and acute writing from those present when the counterculture crashed into the entertainment trade press in the late 60s, and from some of their successors.”

Money raised by the campaign will help fund the book’s publication, complete with cover and illustrations by Savage Pencil, in collaboration with Strange Attractor Press. At the time of writing, the campaign has 23 days to go, with rewards including the book itself, transcripts, a place on Mark Sinker’s workshop for writers, audio recordings of the conference, and more.

Greetings from The Wire HQ

Like so many others in the global underground music community, The Wire has been left shell shocked and distraught by the result of the UK's EU referendum. Beyond all the political and economic arguments over whether the EU is a benign or malignant organisation, an incubator of freedom and democracy or an agent of neoliberal capitalism, the emotional, spiritual and psychological impact of the referendum result on anyone who values and draws strength from the kind of cultural border crossings and plurality of artistic expression that The Wire has always looked to reflect and represent has been profound.

A new website has just been launched to celebrate the field work of folk music collector Peter Kennedy

Between the 1950s and the 2000s, Peter Kennedy (1922–2006) collected, researched and published British and Irish folk music and customs. He worked for the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), the BBC and as an independent operator, collaborating with other prominent figures like Alan Lomax, Hamish Henderson, Sean O’Boyle and Seamus Ennis.

The site can be navigated through a timeline of his recording itinerary between 1952–62. It also has a performer index that links up over 650 musicians to sound recordings, photos and notes.

“What makes this website unique is the way it contextualises recordings and photographs of performers with Peter’s own notes about them,” says Andrew Pace, who has been cataloguing the Kennedy collection since 2010. “Whilst the British Library’s catalogue is useful as a search tool, it doesn’t reveal how a collection was formed and developed – and it doesn’t tell us very much about who created it. This new website gives us a better idea of what’s in this collection by refocusing attention on Peter as a recordist and reconstituting his material into a form that better resembles how he created it.”

The Peter Kennedy Archive was designed by Andrew Pace after an AHRC Cultural Engagement project grant was awarded to City University London. It is also partially funded by the National Folk Music Fund.

Archive specialist label Light In The Attic is about to release a set of previously unheard recordings of the legendary Betty and Miles Davis session that took place in 1969. The couple met in 1967, the same year Betty wrote "Uptown (To Harlem)" for The Chambers Brothers. Betty introduced Miles to Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, which Miles notes in his autobiography had an influence on his sound. Many commentators have said you could hear it on Bitches Brew (1970) and On The Corner (1972).

Betty Davis: The Unheard Columbia Years 1968–1969 is mostly compiled from the previously unreleased tracks laid down during the Betty-Miles session, all remastered from original analogue tapes. The majority of recordings took place in Studios B and E at Columbia’s 52nd Street Studios in May 1969. The sessions were produced by Miles and Teo Macero, and featured Betty on vocals. The famous roll call of musicians who participated in the sessions include Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell, guitarist John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, the Dylan/Miles session bassist Harvey Brooks, Billy Cox, Wayne Shorter, organist Larry Young. Also featured on the album are Hugh Masekela alongside Joe Sample and Wayne Henderson of The Jazz Crusaders, who played on the 1968 single It's My Life/Live, Love, Learn.

Coming with the full support of Betty herself, Light In The Attic will be releasing the set on 1 July. The label has previous reissued other Betty Davis records, including her self-titled solo debut (1973), They Say I'm Different (1974), Nasty Gal (1975) and Is It Love Or Desire?, which was originally recorded in 1976 but only went public in 2009.

The album package includes interviews, rare photos and other historical documents from co-producer Teo Macero.

In other Betty related news, she has been working with film makers Phil Cox and Damon Smith on a new feature length documentary about her life. Called Nasty Gal, its projected release date is sometime in 2017.

Keyboard player and synthesizer pioneer Bernie Worrell died aged 72 at his home in Everson, Washington. Worrell announced in early 2016 that he was battling stage four lung cancer.

Dubbed “the wizard of woo” due to his ability to coax a wide range of unearthly sounds and textures from organ and synthesizer, Worrell was born in Long Branch, New Jersey and raised in Plainfield, NJ. By the time he was three years old, he was an accomplished pianist. Initially working as a classical musician, he eventually found his way onto the bar band circuit where he met George Clinton, then fronting R&B outfit The Parliaments. This group disbanded and, after relocating to Detroit, mutated into Parliament. Clinton formed sister band Funkadelic – featuring many of the same musicians – whose second album Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow marked Worrell’s initiation into the group. The album is notable for showcasing some of his wildest playing, perhaps most notably on the explosive “I Wanna Know If It's Good To You”.

Worrell remained an integral part of the Parliament-Funkadelic mothership crew, providing the molasses-thick synth basslines and eruptive squirts of wormlike electricity that would come to define P-funk and, in turn, influence boogie, disco, house, techno and hiphop (specifically the G-funk popularised by Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and Warren G in the early 90s). “Flash Light”, “(Not Just) Knee Deep”, “Mothership Connection (Star Child)”, “Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)” and “Aqua Boogie” all demonstrated Worrell's ingenuity and virtuosity.

In the early 1980s Worrell became a member of the expanded Talking Heads line-up preserved for posterity in Jonathan Demme’s landmark concert film Stop Making Sense. Much more than a sideman, he made a significant contribution to Talking Heads’ sound. His most distinctive contribution is arguably the infectious two-note synth figure that serves as the intro to “Girlfriend Is Better”.

In addition to Parliament-Funkadelic and Talking Heads, Worrell worked as collaborator and/or sessioneer with a wide variety of artists including Sly & Robbie, Fela Kuti, Prince Paul, Les Claypool, Bill Laswell, Mos Def, Jack Bruce and Midday Veil.

Worrell's death was announced by his wife Judie on Friday via the musician's Facebook page: “AT 11:54, June 24, 2016, Bernie transitioned Home to The Great Spirit. Rest in peace, my love – you definitely made the world a better place. Till we meet again, vaya con Dios.”