Quiet City

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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. Alison Balsom (trumpet), Nicholas Daniel (cor anglais), Tom Poster (piano); Britten Sinfonia/Scott Stroman

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 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”. 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. 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. 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."

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Audiences and musicians tend to discuss the philosophical meanings of Ives’s Unanswered Question; what does it mean to you? 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. 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. 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. 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.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. 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. The album is based around American repertoire, featuring music by Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Charles Ives, and Miles Davis (his arrangement of Joaquín Rodrigo's famed Concierto de Aranjuez) — where she has swapped out her normal C trumpet for something more "old and a bit smelly, with a bit of an air leak" — her uncle Peter's personal instrument! Balsom said the usual C trumpet she plays has too lyrical a sound for something by Miles Davis. Her uncle's trumpet proved to be the perfect instrument for it's slightly rougher tone, which worked with the live-recording set up they had. Listen to Alison Balsom on Classic Breakfast Loading...

Alison Balsom’s new album Quiet City will be released worldwide on Warner Classics on 26 August 2022 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 orchestration of Miles is fantastic. How much of it is close to the original, and what modifications did you do? 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. There’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.

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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.

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. 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.”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.