Unusual and quite brief given it’s an EP this saxophone and cello setting reflects a long time collaboration and is the work of English jazz saxophonist Trish Clowes and Scottish classical cellist Louise McMonagle. Tunes are written by each player with ‘Rise’ jointly conceived.
There’s a lot of music out there that bypasses “exact” (whatever that is) notions of genre although it’s perfectly fair to stab at calling a sound something or other as a broad brushstroke. This is one example. And I suppose a lot of people will file this under “classical”. But it’s not as simple as that at all. There are few obvious clues beyond loose captioning if looking to be some sort of archaeologist unearthing what makes this all tick.
I don’t think you should get too het up with deciding what bracket to put it under unless that helps your understanding. I can’t see how it can, necessarily, but whatever. Like an object in a museum the artwork is more important that the note the curator has mounted on a little explanatory card alongside.
Colour Fields‘ beyond any one genre accommodating freshness is characterful. But it’s even more than that. And the plangent abstract mood and the sheer physicality of the way the pieces are recorded prove more important.
So you get a sense of the building blocks of the instruments and the way sound is squeezed out of wood, reed and brass.
You feel the air, get a 3D representation of these intimate reveries somehow easily enough given a strong studio sonic footprint. So it doesn’t feel fake or overly worked on.
As I wrote in these pages before if you like the longstanding work of German cellist Anja Lechner particularly found in a jazz or near-jazz setting – as in the Anouar Brahem group featuring Dave Holland and Django Bates that delivered the magnificent After the Last Sky last year – then you can quite easily go the extra mile to embrace the milieu.
The recording goes back some years to 2022. Colour Fields as an entity is quite avant-garde but not in a self-conscious way. It’s avant-garde in the sense that the structures of the pieces aren’t standard and you feel a certain spontaneous sense of thought and development that isn’t found on an overly produced work. It has its own world. I think too Clowes has shorn one of her main influences here in Iain Ballamy. Earlier recordings of hers made that debt to Ballamy easier to discern: you can’t really hear that at all on Colour Fields.
It’s quite mournful, especially ‘Song For Saariaho’ which is written by Clowes and dedicated to Kaija Saariaho [no me, neither] inspired, according to the notes on Bandcamp, by a duo piece of the Finnish composer’s for bass clarinet and cello called ‘Oi Kuu.’ That’s from 1990 – in English the title means something like “For a Moon”. Watch Ensemble Offspring performing the piece, above. It’s helpful to absorb this too.
I heard a little – ‘Cells’ it was – from this delightful duo album a few months ago. But it wasn’t until today that I managed to hear the rest of the work. Thank goodness I remembered to listen. The full release is even more rewarding than I could have hoped it would be.
MORE FROM MARLBANK
- Trish Clowes, Try Me, Stoney Lane **** recommended
- Immy Churchill, Songs That Shaped Me, Vortex Downstairs, ****
- “It’s about the exchange”: Tom Challenger and Evan Parker unite
- Anthony Joseph, The Ark, Heavenly Sweetness ****
- Marvin Muoneké, Mark Lockheart, Gary Crosby, Alex Webb and Winston Clifford – Cadogan Hall **** recommended
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