Sunday, 30 November 2008 07:45 Written by Geoffrey Simon

Jazz Notes

That long lunch...

A group of us met for lunch at Blackfriar's Wine Bar on 27 June 2007, to work out the plan for Give It One. It was, to the day, a year and a half before the CD would be released.

Hugh Seenan pulled the meeting together. Hugh was Principal Horn of the LSO for over twenty years and is now a leading British freelance and session player, in addition to serving as Professor of Horn at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He'd had the idea for The London Horn Sound in the late 90s and was feeling that the time was now ripe for a jazz horn recording by way of follow up.

Hugh invited the talented composer/arranger/French hornists Richard Bissill, Timothy Jackson and Jim Rattigan, along with Pip Eastop of the High Notes, whom we somehow knew would play a pivotal role. I was there for Cala Records and also as the conductor. I was kidded for remarking that jazz was finding its way more and more into my orchestral programming. Strings playing jazz? Yeah right, but could French horns really, really do it?

Gwilym Simcock arrived a little later from a recording session and his entry was a moment in history. He was more than twenty years younger than everyone else present except Tim Jackson, but he was greeted by these crusty pros with almost embarrassing reverence, as a star and a genius. (I soon saw for myself that he is indeed both these.) He countered, don't be ridiculous, you guys have been my heroes and role models since I was in short pants wanting to be a horn player. Eventually the mutual admiration society settled down and we got down to business. But the chemistry of that day, the shared excitement and pooled expertise, lasted throughout the project and can be heard in the music. The team was strong.

Crucially, two things emerged which were to be pivotal to the final product.

Typically in each of The London Sound Series recordings we have gone for variety in style and mood, partly through programming philosophy but also to showcase the full capability and range of the featured instrument. It's tougher to do than a single-mood album but it makes for more satisfying listening, we believe. So a lot of time was taken over lunch to ensure that Give It One would have a good mix of blues, Latin, up-tempo jazz and ballad. We decided not to venture into soul and R&B as we wanted to prove the point that pure jazz and the French horn are truly compatible. Ideas were broached and shared, and eventually each of the four composer/arrangers undertook to produce a certain amount of minutes and a certain mix of genres. There was no shortage of suggestions and some of the proposed ways forward sounded seriously intriguing. But so far it was all theoretical—no jot of music had been notated at that stage.

We then agreed that each composer/arranger would ensure his output of however many minutes must form within itself an entertaining and satisfying mini-programme. The theory was that when the final tracklisting of the CD was being decided upon during post-production, a shuffling of everyone's contributions would yield the same logical and well-structured succession of items as it had done in past London Sound Series projects. But as it turned out, Richard, Tim, Jim and Gwilym succeeded so well with their mini-programmes that after several months of experimentation over the track order we found that the correct solution for this recording was to keep each composer/arranger's work together, as you can see in the final tracklisting. It's this which provides Give It One with its item-by-item logic on the one hand and its arching sense of direction on the other.

It also solved a problem not foreseen over lunch, one we could be envied for having. At the sessions we recorded over 87 minutes of music—an almost unheard of amount in the time available. The musicians were that quick and everyone without exception met the challenges placed in front of them. This was way more music than can be contained on a CD, of course. Here Tim's self-contained, significant 14-minute Sound Of Music Jazz Suite proved to be perfect as a separate but enhancing part of Give It One. And we realised that the most exciting—and in today's terms most appropriate—way to present this suite to our audiences would be as a digital download exclusively from this site.

We had long known that the recording, to be made at Air Studios in Hampstead, north London, would have to take place at one of those rare times in the year when orchestras would wisely not be working and musicians would sensibly be enjoying Quality Time at home with their families. Otherwise every major London ensemble would have been essentially without its horn section, which we might not have gotten away with. The choices were two: either the dog days of summer (which were coming up too soon after the lunch to be practicable) or the sacrosanct period between Christmas and the New Year. We finally settled for a day of rehearsal on Friday, 28 December and five recording sessions over the following two and a half days. We finished with champagne just before New Year's eve set in. The timing in the end was designed to minimise, as best we could, the number of relationship breakups.

We planned the day of rehearsal not only to have sight of the dots but to recapture the special "London Horn Sound"—it's more than the sum of its parts—and to play in our chops as jazzers. All the hornists had played jazz before (I'm by no means the only orchestral conductor programming jazz) so swing was not an issue. What took some time was the realisation that, for this particular project, the horns would at times need to take the place of trumpets, trombones and saxes. Generally this meant much more emphasis on the start of the note, which is relatively untypical of classical horn playing. That the ensemble accepted and mastered this so quickly was quite amazing to me. Particularly as that distinctive "smokey horn" quality so famously associated with horn section playing could be, and was, recalled at a moment's notice when it was needed.

What didn't hurt at all was the unfailing jazz inspiration provided by Gwilym at the keyboard, more than ably assisted by Sam Burgess on double bass and Martin France on drums. In fact, once we were in the groove we found that it was no longer really about jazz at all, much less whether or not we classical folk were "getting" it; it was pure music-making, and that's how it ought to be.

Geoffrey Simon