Quiet City

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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.

You just signed a five-album deal with Warner. The first one, Quiet City, explores American music from the 20th century and will be released on August 26th. You recorded Copland’s Quiet City, a newly edited version of Bernstein’s Lonely Town from On the Town, Ives’s Unanswered Question, a brand-new orchestral arrangement from Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and two works by the iconic Miles Davis/Gil Evans partnership, Concierto de Aranjuez and My Ship. 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. The Rodrigo adaptation is, perhaps not surprisingly, infused throughout with the spirit of smooth jazz – near-constant drum brushes to begin with, and a string bass underpinning the texture – and in places diverges dramatically from the original. Despite Balsom not having focused on jazz to any great extent in her discography to date, it’s clearly something she has a natural affinity for, with a particularly appealing and at times breathy flugel-like tone in the lower register. But perhaps most poignantly for Alison Balsom, Aaron Copland's Quiet City is a work that she has cherished since she was a young woman. Balsom tells Russell how when she first heard this work at the age of 17, it completely changed her life.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. 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. 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. 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. But one of the other reasons that album came about was because I was invited to play at the Barbican in London a few years ago with the Britten Sinfonia, and they asked me to play the Concierto de Aranjuez, Miles Davies and Gil Evans’ version of Rodrigo’s Sketches of Spain. I wasn’t sure if I was the right person for it, being a classical trumpet player, and I didn’t know if it would sound right with an orchestra. But in fact, it turned out that the Britten Sinfonia are a very flexible ensemble and not really defined by genre. They have some of the best non-classical musicians in London who also play in bands, who play classical, jazz and many other styles. When I went and participated in this concert, I was mesmerised by their playing. It didn’t sound pastiche or like a copy of Gil Evans’ recording — it sounded really like what Gil Evans would have wanted. It really had that sound, rather than a classical version of that sound. So I was very inspired by that.

The arrangement feels so natural. Did you have some input on what trumpet lines you’d like to combine? The album will also feature Balsom’s newly edited version of Bernstein’s Lonely Town from his 1944 musical On the Town, depicting a visitor’s bewilderment and loneliness despite being in the crowds of New York City. This is followed by Ives’ extraordinary, ethereal and pioneering 1908 work The Unanswered Question for solo trumpet, flute quartet and strings, asking the “Eternal question of existence”. The orchestration of Miles is fantastic. How much of it is close to the original, and what modifications did you do? Alison Balsom (trumpet), Nicholas Daniel (cor anglais), Tom Poster (piano); Britten Sinfonia/Scott StromanThere’s something intensely evocative about the solo trumpet – a plaintive, plangent, melancholic sound that speaks just as eloquently of the great outdoors as it does of the inner city. Of course, the jazz connotations are inescapable when the hour is late and the mood is blue; and if ever a piece were to be the envy of a player such as Alison Balsom then it would surely be Gershwin’s small but mighty exercise in fusion, Rhapsody in Blue. But it’s Gershwin’s hands on those piano keys and the Paul Whiteman Band’s principal clarinettist turning a tremulous run into an oily glissando that defines it from bar one. I 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. Lastly, I want to give a big shout-out to the trumpet section, who are experts in a lot of this music and have really thought about it all their lives. They played so incredibly, and they really inspired me on the sessions. 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.

License for institutional access: The International Journal of Music does not issue or require the agreement of a formal license for institutional access to its content. Instead, it has chosen to adopt a cooperative and collaborative approach as exemplified by the SERU (Shared E-Resource Understanding) approach to e-resource subscriptions. This approach recognizes that the provision of timely, high-quality materials and their protection is in the mutual interests of all parties and offers savings in time and cost by enabling access within a framework of shared understanding and good faith. Miles Davis expressed his personality through his trumpet. And he was effortlessly stylish. He didn’t feel the need to do what Dizzy Gillespie, for example, was doing with the trumpet. That wasn’t him—that was someone else. OK, so Miles is Miles, and his is a totally different world to the one I inhabit. Yet, at the same time, I’m fascinated by that place where all the genres meet. Jazz musicians and classical composers of his time had such respect for each other even though they were doing different things. And mid-20th-century America was the perfect example of where they were all influencing each other, doing their own thing but open to each other’s influences. I had a wonderful time doing it and was amazed by the skills of the Britten Sinfonia, who played with so much panache and style.” Alison Balsom’s new album Quiet City will be released worldwide on Warner Classics on 26 August 2022 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)

Alison Balsom: Quiet City

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. 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).

I don’t think of the Bernstein as an arrangement, really. It has a hauntingly beautiful melody with a little trumpet solo at the beginning, but it also has a cor anglais solo. And I thought that the cor anglais solo would work on the trumpet, so I basically just edited it and put the cor anglais bit on the trumpet as well. It wasn’t really that much of a change; the orchestra stayed the same. I have this habit where I feel I have to prove to the world what the trumpet is capable of... And I end up with a three-hour long list of music that I want to play in every album." Quiet City germinated from seeds planted in 2017, when the trumpeter accepted an invitation from the Britten Sinfonia to take part in the Sound Unbound festival at London’s Barbican Centre. “They asked me to perform the first part of Sketches of Spain, Gil Evans’ arrangement for Miles Davis of the “Adagio” from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez,” she recalls. “I wasn’t sure I was the right person for it—I thought they should probably be asking a jazz musician. But when I looked at the score, I saw it had been created like a classical piece. It was an opportunity to say, ‘OK, if you’re asking me to do this, I’ll give it my best shot.’” 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. To say that Balsom is in touch with the soul of her instrument would be to downplay her artistry. And, as I say, there are technical things she does here so effortlessly that we her listeners can just relax into the phrase-making as if it’s something she’s made up on the spot. That, of course, is the essence of an in-the-moment jazzer and I was delighted that she chose to include two telling tributes to the great Miles Davis.Think of the trumpet as brash? Think of America the same way? Alison Balsom’s new recording belies both impressions. Taking its title from Copland’s Quiet City, the prevailing sense in this American musical journey is of contemplation in the early hours. More than ably partnered by the Britten Sinfonia under Scott Stroman, Balsom is mesmerisingly plaintive in the Copland, matched by Nicholas Daniel’s elegiac cor anglais. Balsom is equally adroit capturing the down-at-heel soulfulness of Bernstein’s Lonely Town and the existential transcendence of Ives’s The Unanswered Question.