Future Yard presents Penguin Cafe

Penguin Cafe Orchestra (PCO) was a British avant-pop and chamber jazz group founded in 1972 by Simon Jeffes. The ensemble blended classical, folk, jazz, and minimalism with a whimsical, experimental spirit, creating a sound that is famously genre defying. Their music featured unconventional instrumentation, including ukuleles, harmoniums, and found sounds, resulting in a warm and organic aesthetic.

Penguin Cafe was founded by Arthur Jeffes in 2009, bringing together a talented and disparate group of musicians initially to perform his father Simon Jeffes’ legacy of world-renowned PCO music, ten years after his untimely death in 1997.

Arthur, a talented composer in his own right, quickly began to create new and unique genre-defying music, blending classical instruments like violins and cellos with unexpected elements like ukuleles and melodicas, the spellbinding philosophy of the Penguin Cafe always in his mind.