Today is the release day for Music for Bosch People, a new album by UK composer/trombonist/dear friend Alex Paxton, out on Birmingham Record Company. I contributed some sax noises to every track (except for Londonglum). You can read more about the album (and purchase physical/digital copies) here, or stream on whichever platform you fancy.
I adore this music – it’s so full of life, and totally adventurous/unlike anything I’ve ever heard or played before. Highly recommend listening!!! Congrats Alex!
Around a year ago, I attended a fundraiser for Play for Progress in an attempt to remedy a vigorous bout of the winter blues. In the spirit(s) of things, I made a pledge to donate some/all of the proceeds from a 2020 concert to Play for Progress – which was over-promising in a way I don’t think anyone could have really predicted. In any case, reflecting on this pledge a year later, and with a handful of solo compositions and improvisations made over the last year or two collecting dust, I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone and release some recordings as an EP on Bandcamp, with all proceeds until the New Year going to Play for Progress (save for Bandcamp’s 15% cut).
The 4 tracks of this EP were composed and recorded over the course of 2019-2020, starting with “Bridge”. They’re written for layered/looped saxophones, with some electronic elements added for atmosphere and a bit of production. Some of them have worked well in the past performed with a fairly minimal set up of loop + effects pedals and I’m hoping to do much more of that once the pandemic is over.
I guess the genre is probably best described as “post-classical”, though all of the pieces were conceived as/feature improvisations, and I used a jazz saxophone set up throughout. While I won’t be so delusional as to call it “beyond classification”, the works on this album reflect a lot of my interests – minimalism, improvisation, melody, extended techniques, ambience – and so I feel that it is a fairly honest amalgamation of my own tastes, though without really being an obvious reflection of my training as a quote unquote classical musician.
Since 2018, I’ve had the good fortune of doing some administrative and promotional work for one of the UK’s pre-eminent composers, Brian Elias. If you haven’t come across his work before, a good place to start his is Five Songs to Poems by Irinia Ratushinskya, a monumental work for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, based on the poems of Soviet dissident Irina Ratushinskya – its genesis and reception is a whole post in of itself, which I’ll save for another time.
A couple of years ago, I had been put in touch with a friend of Brian’s who was looking for performers for a charity function. My friend Wynton and I performed some jazz standards for baritone sax and piano, and Brian, intrigued by the sound of the baritone sax, floated the idea of writing a piece for the instrument. I was pleasantly surprised when last year he informed me that he’d been asked to contribute a new work to the Royal Academy of Music’s RAM200 project, which he decided to write for baritone saxophone. I’m very fortunate to be the dedicatee of the work, with the premiere going to my good friend Rob Burton, a current student at the Academy.
I think it’s a wonderful piece and I hope it will find a unique place in the saxophone repertoire. Brian has written brilliantly for the saxophone before, in his ‘Pythikos Nomos’ for alto saxophone and piano, and I’m thrilled to be associated with this new work. Enjoy!
Over the past few years I’ve been lucky to collaborate with a close friend, Ross Koopmans (Ross K) on his debut album Braedalyn. This release has been many years in the making, and my involvement with it has transformed dramatically over the years – from small contributions of crystalline saxophone multiphonics, to clarinet (!), piano, conducting (!!), helping to produce a live version of an early version during our studies at the Royal College of Music with a 12+ member ensemble, and general moral support and advice where I could offer it.
The Picture, formerly known as The Picture Runs its Course, is the third track on the album, and in the end is my most substantial contribution to the album, although its inclusion was anything but pre-ordained. In the summer of 2019, in what felt like an entirely different world, Ross and I shared the bill on a show at Servant Jazz Quarters in Dalston. I opened the set with a performance of James Tenney’s Saxony, and joined Ross for his set, initially set to play some piano and synths. A day or two before the gig, the idea to put a saxophone solo was raised. I was reluctant, for as much as I have long revered the saxophonic sidemen of pop music – Donny McCaslin’s contribution to David Bowie’s Blackstar was a strong reference point for this album at one time – and sought to make my mark on music in this way, I’ve never considered it to be anything more than an aspiration, and certainly not one which my primarily classical training has prepared me for. But I dug up an old Otto Link mouthpiece and reed and hoped for the best on the day, and the result was surprising to both of us – we were both convinced it’d been a flop immediately after (I’ll leave that to listeners to decide), but we were shocked to find that not only was the live recording salvageable and somehow the perfect piece of the puzzle for this track, but also completely impossible for me to replicate in the studio a few days after the show. So the final result is the raw recording from Servant Jazz Quarters, out of an SM57 microphone.
I’ve learned, primarily through this process which I’ve been both tenuously and intensely involved in for as long as I’ve known Ross, that collaboration between close friends is bound to test the relationship between the interested parties – any musician will tell you that the boundary between their personal lives and their creative output is a fragile one. Fortunately, our friendship has survived and I look forward to many future collaborations. Congratulations Ross!
Over the past few weeks, hunkered in my home studio in lockdown, I’ve very much enjoyed putting together this recording of Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint. Originally written for multi-tracked clarinets and soloist, Susan Fancher’s arrangement for multi-tracked saxophones works wonderfully, and I feel imbues the work with a completely different character.
I first encountered the work as a first-year undergraduate at the University of Toronto, and was a real “gateway drug” into contemporary music for me. I’ve wanted to record and perform the work as a soloist for some time, but the lockdown period is the first real opportunity I’ve had to hone my chops on recording software.
David Zucchi 