Häxan

Matthew Kilner, Graeme Stephen and Neil Birse are playing at Cowdray Hall in the Aberdeen Art Gallery on Thursday 5 November. It's a lunchtime concert, running from 12:45pm to 1:30pm, so it's the sort of thing you can slip into over a long break and still be back at your desk by half-past one.

The trio are working from music they composed to accompany Häxan, the trailblazing 1922 silent film about witchcraft and the supernatural. They blend composition and improvisation into a single piece, and they describe the sound as being inspired by mystery, folklore and the supernatural. What you'll hear are excerpts from that newly commissioned work, which was originally written for the Festival of Darkness screening of Häxan and commissioned by NEAT and Haddo Arts.

There's a good bit of local connection in the line-up. Neil Birse is an Aberdeen-born, classically trained jazz pianist who graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Graeme Stephen is also from Aberdeen; he's been playing guitar since he was nine and has written a significant body of film music for the early masterpieces of 1920s German cinema, so the silent film connection sits right in his wheelhouse. Matthew Kilner is an award-winning saxophonist based in Glasgow, winner of the 2019 Ogston Performance Prize and a finalist in the 2023 BBC Radio Scotland Young Jazz Musician of the Year competition. Together they're saxophone, guitar and piano.

It's a pay-what-you-can session, so you can give what you can afford on the day. That puts it at 12:45pm at Cowdray Hall, inside the Aberdeen Art Gallery on Schoolhill, AB10 1FQ.