This past week I’ve been playing and recording with MY IRIS, but before I get to that…

Back in November 2022, I premiered my commission ‘Carousel Trees’ with the London Sinfonietta, Lauren Kinsella, Will Sach & Saleem Rahman at the Purcell Room, and now the Sinfonietta have released the video on YouTube:

The full instrument line-up is voice, saxophone, piano, bass, drums, trumpet, bass clarinet, alto flute, violin & cello. Carousel Trees is a kind of ‘found poem’, drawing on material from the song ‘I’ll be seeing you’ (music and lyrics by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal respectively). You’ll hear the jazz quartet within the ensemble (myself, Lauren, Will and Saleem) perform this jazz standard at the end of the video, segued from the last section of my new piece.

Also streaming this month is my Wigmore Hall livestream from 2021 with Ross Stanley. You have to log in to the Wigmore website, but it’s free. If you haven’t already seen it, the re-broadcast will give you a very good idea of what our forthcoming duo album will be like, as we play a lot of the material we ended up recording later that year… Music by each of us, plus Duke Ellington, Osvaldo Farrés, Marcel Dupré, Antonio Vivaldi, Joe Cutler… Click here to watch & listen.

Another nice piece of news, a couple of weeks ago I discovered that I’d made it into US jazz magazine Downbeat’s 2023 critics poll for the first time, in both the Rising Star Soprano Saxophone & Tenor Saxophone categories – thanks very much to Birmingham promoter Tony Dudley-Evans for bringing this to my attention!

I’m going to finish this update with some nice photos by Chris Kelly from the MY IRIS gig in Guildford, and our recording last week… Here we are in the soundcheck and gig at the beautiful St Mary’s Church…

Then the very next day we shot a new music video with the very talented Will Darkin… performing a tune of mine called ‘Brook’. We also recorded some other tracks which are going to be released fairly soon, alongside the video. I’m going to be putting out the music a little differently for this particular project, so watch this space! Here are a couple of photos (again by Chris Kelly) from the day in the meantime…