Trish Clowes is one of the brightest stars to have emerged during the so-called British jazz boom of the past decade or more. The 39-year-old London-based saxophonist and composer has led myriad groups, including the adventurous quartet My Iris, released eight strikingly inventive and highly acclaimed albums and shown a rare gift for integrating jazz and improvisation with classical composition – she has written for such prestigious ensembles as the London Sinfonietta and the BBC Concert Orchestra. “I like music that explores a lot of colours and textures, that is open to interpretation, to people’s imaginations,” she told me in 2018.
That admirable ambition is more than evident on Journey to Where – despite, on the surface, Clowes (pronounced “clues”) paring the music back to a more intimate duo with the English pianist (and regular band member) Ross Stanley.
The album, recorded in July 2021 in London’s venerable (and acoustically exceptional) chamber-music venue Wigmore Hall, where Clowes is an associate artist, offers a wonderfully diverse programme of compositions, including four originals, Duke Ellington’s Prelude to a Kiss and the traditional folk song The Month of January. There are also interpretations of Herbert Howells’s Gloucester Service and Marcel Dupré’s Prelude in G Minor – two Stanley favourites from his time as an organ scholar at Marlborough College. This is a pairing not afraid to head forward by looking back.
The playing is rarely less than inspired. Clowes’s tone on tenor, which she plays exclusively here, is a study in controlled vulnerability, at once warm, tender and assured. Like many of her influences, from Wayne Shorter through Joe Lovano to Iain Ballamy, she is a musician of great sensitivity and strength. As is Stanley; there are echoes in his singular playing of the quiet virtuosity of John Taylor, the harmonic sophistication of Bill Evans and the lyrical fluency of Wynton Kelly.
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For all the rarefied setting and undoubted artistry, this is vital music full of swing, emotion and atmosphere. Something more than the sum of its parts is conjured up: a deep understanding, a musical bond, a little bit of magic perhaps.
