Quiet City

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Alison Balsom (trumpet), Nicholas Daniel (cor anglais), Tom Poster (piano); Britten Sinfonia/Scott Stroman The album Quiet City explores American music of the20th century, composed in the era of the explosion of jazz. The sound of the solo trumpet inclassical and jazz music at this time was contrasting in style, and yet often evocative, plaintive and haunting, and so iconic to the aural landscape of America.Fascinated by the meeting point of these two styles at this time between both composers and performers, Balsom looks to share her deep love for this particular character of the instrument that defies genres.

On the rest of the album, I’m using my Bach C trumpet, which I love, and it was just very straightforward. Especially for the Gershwin, I find it a really virtuosic, peaceful instrument that I love. It just works for me, and it’s a great tool. But I did use thousands of mutes!That line that Miles Davis played at the time — he had worked this out; he wasn’t just improvising throughout. What he actually did on that final recording was transcribed. He was very deliberate on what ended up on that album, and it wasn’t an accident or a decision to just use the best take. So that got transcribed, and that’s what I recorded and played, in homage to Miles Davis as the composer of the trumpet line of that piece. There were one or two moments which I knew were written down for Miles Davis that he chose not to do, but I did do; certain notes here and there. I think that was because I just liked what Gil Evans had written there, and Miles did his own thing, but I wanted to do what Gil had written. But there are very few of those moments. That’s the exception to the rule. I just wanted to soak up what it was that he was bringing to the trumpet and the repertoire. I wouldn’t describe myself as a jazz musician, so there was no way I was going to make a trumpet line over the top of what Gil Evans had written that was going to be anything like what he did! So why would you ignore that? It was out of my love and respect for him that I recreated that. It’s a risky thing because you could say that it’s just copying, but I see what he wrote as composition. So I don’t see what I’ve done as copying; I see it as reperforming his ideas like you would with any composition.

This slight misfire aside, there is much to enjoy, not least the arrangements Gil Evans made for Miles Davis of Kurt Weill’s My Shipand, more extensively, Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. Written for Davis’s Sketches of Spain album, the wonderfully sultry take on the Concierto was the starting point for Balsom’s project. Revisiting the improvisatory practice of jazz icons with highly idiosyncratic techniques can fall flat, but Balsom and the Britten Sinfonia make it work. They are entirely idiomatic and wonderfully engaging, both here and in their other sketches of America. Balsom and the Britten Sinfonia regrouped at the Barbican’s Milton Court concert hall in September 2021 to reprise Sketches of Spain. They also placed Copland’s Quiet City in company with Simon Wright’s anything-but-quiet arrangement of the original jazz band version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Warner Classics recorded the concert live and convened subsequent sessions to catch Ives’ The Unanswered Question, the Lonely Town “Pas de deux” from Bernstein’s On the Town, and another Gil Evans gem, “My Ship” from Kurt Weill’s 1941 Broadway musical, Lady in the Dark. Use of the IJM content by those entitled to access by their relationship with a participating institution should read the terms of use for individuals. It reminds me of the thing we all talk about as musicians; we instinctively know how important music is in one’s life. You don’t have to become a professional musician for music to be really important and make life worth living. I don’t think, as humans, we fully understand the benefits of music. We know that there are so many benefits of music, but we don’t fully understand how to apply all of those benefits to the rest of our lives yet. Some of us do, but it’s certainly not part of any government policy! And yet we know it’s a fact. One thing that keeps returning to my mind is that music is like a concept that takes over one’s language when words have run out; when we don’t have any other way of expressing ourselves. Music is almost the next highest step onwards. And I think this is what this piece means to me, more than any other. Music is as good a way as any to explain the universe, and I think this piece is a brilliant encapsulation of that. So that’s the only thing that doesn’t quite come home for me in this collection. Copland’s Quiet City– most beautifully realised by Balsom, Nicholas Daniel (cor anglais) and the Britten Sinfonia – is a magic casement opening on to a dreamy nocturnal world of deserted streets and Edward Hopperesque bars and, as it happens, a close cousin of Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, which behaves like the philosophical subtext of Copland’s piece. In the Pas de deux ‘Lonely Town’ from Leonard Bernstein’s first Broadway musical On the Town, loneliness begets rapture and Balsom’s own arrangement really hits the spot.Few pieces are more quintessentially American than Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and Simon Wright’s inventive arrangement for Balsom naturally foregrounds the trumpet. There is still a significant role for the piano, despatched with élan by Tom Poster, though the instrument points to why this version of the Rhapsody is ultimately unconvincing. Despite her romping, virtuosic bravura, Balsom’s wings are clipped by constant pianistic reminders of what the trumpet cannot do. I have this tendency when recording. I’m so busy trying to prove to the world that the trumpet can do so much more than people think; to try and cover too many themes. If we’re talking about America, should we talk about jazz, soul, blues, musical theatre, film, or twentieth-century greats? The twin centrepieces of this album are Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and the Adagio from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez – both firmly established in the canon of classical hits, and both ripe for revisiting and reworking. Simon Wright’s trumpet-centric arrangement of the Rhapsody occupies something of a middle ground between the lushness of the widely-performed orchestral version and the punch of the original for jazz band. Balsom’s delicious rendition of the opening glissando assuages any initial doubts about the wisdom of the arrangement; her effortless, unforced high notes soon make their presence felt, and the sharing of the material between her and pianist Tom Poster in what has effectively become a double concerto feels as natural as if it had always been that way. The orchestration of Miles is fantastic. How much of it is close to the original, and what modifications did you do? British trumpeter Alison Balsom joins Russell Torrance to talk about what it was like to record her new album Quiet City (out Friday 26th August).

Alison Balsom commented, “This album has been an utter joy to make. I loved every minute of the sessions with the brilliant Britten Sinfonia, conductor Scott Stroman, oboist and cor anglais player Nicholas Daniel and my great friend and collaborator pianist Tom Poster. The concept of this project began decades ago, when I decided that Copland’s Quiet City was a work that everyone needed to hear – especially so as Copland reveals the scene so brilliantly via the solo trumpet and cor. There is a true melancholy in this work that only a certain type of trumpet playing can achieve, and across the collection on the album I’ve tried to show that through the unique lens of the trumpet, the wonderful bridge and mutual respect between the classical composers and arrangers, and the jazz greats can be seen. For many of us, the sentiment behind Quiet Cityis pertinent at the moment, as we emerge from the loneliness of the pandemic and into another chapter of darkness in today’ s turbulent world. Bernstein: On the Town – Lonely Town. Pas de deux; Copland: Quiet City; Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (arr. Wright); Ives: The Unanswered Question; Rodrigo: Concierto de Aranjuez (arr. G Evans); Weill: My Ship (arr. G Evans) The Ives is also an original work. Amazingly, it’s the earliest on the disc and feels, in a way, as the most pioneering and the most modern. He wrote it in 1908, which was very early for music like this. It’s really existential and thought-provoking. It’s also really musically complex and avant-garde. But it has a soundscape that’s just ravishing. Again, it felt like such a privilege for there to be a trumpet part: a haunting, lonely solo trumpet voice that made me love the piece and want to play it and have an opportunity to record it. And it’s a short piece, so you’re never going to really know how to curate it and have an opportunity to record a piece like this. I was delighted that I felt that it fitted in on this disc. Photo: Hugh Carswell. Balsom’s agility in the Rhapsody is remarkable – not just in fast passagework but in huge leaps across the instrument’s range. The price of adapting piano writing for the trumpet! No less beguiling, though, is her expressive, at times weightless, tone in the opening piece – Copland’s magical, atmospheric Quiet City. Its sheer meditative stillness perhaps makes it a more challenging piece to communicate effectively, but between them Balsom, Stroman and cor anglais Nicholas Daniel create something profound. Alison Balsom’s new album Quiet City will be released worldwide on Warner Classics on 26 August 2022I feel that we all know that Miles Davis was such a legend and iconic musician who almost found another side and character to the trumpet. I felt that it deserved exploring as though he were the composer. I was looking for ways to bring those two worlds together.