Reeds player and composer Tim Garland‘s career has spanned 33 years, and his creativity shows no sign of letting up. Three years in the making, his newest album Moment of Departure will be released via Ubuntu records on 3 May, with a London launch at King’s Place on 30 May. John Fordham talks to the legendary musician, and finds out more about the genesis of this jazz-orchestral fusion double album.

In June 1999, a performance at the Pizza Express Jazz Club by the English reeds player Tim Garland would not only highlight an innovative fusion of jazz and Celtic folk music rare in those days, but also a transformative career change emerging on that weekend for the virtuosic 32 year-old. The gig was the second night of two bookings for Lammas – Garland’s 1990s sextet joining Scottish reels, Robert Burns poetry, jazz, Spanish folk songs and much more – but a last-minute call from jazz superstar Chick Corea, asking Garland to join his new acoustic road-band, obliged him to miss the first show and curtail his presence on the second. 

Still buzzing from the unexpected Corea experience after the Lammas show that night, Garland described to The Guardian a phenomenon he considered “a very American thing”, quite different from the pastoral and lyrically reflective music he often played with his group. But in admiring the American jazz impetus “to completely steam into any situation with everything you have”, he also observed a related but subtly different characteristic. “I tend to play off my environment,” Garland said, “and look for that danger and sparkle whatever the situation is.”

In the quarter-century since, Garland’s skill and receptiveness, as both a composer and an improviser, have been spurred by a restless curiosity to cross musical boundaries in search of the unexpected. In 2004, his solo bass clarinet improvisations, alone with the sights and sounds of the North Sea in St Mary’s Lighthouse on Tyneside, turned into a collection of atmospheric new compositions – first for the new band the Lighthouse Trio (including fast-rising young piano virtuoso Gwilym Simcock), and then for a crossover version with the Northern Sinfonia orchestra that became the album If the Sea Replied. In 2009, Garland won a Grammy award for his symphonic arrangements on Chick Corea’s album The New Crystal Silence, worked extensively in ensembles with Corea, American pianist Geoff Keezer and vibraphonist Joe Locke, and then released the much-acclaimed Songs to the North Sky in 2014. 

A seamless interweaving of Nordic saxophone ambiance and soulful freebop dynamism, folded within orchestral textures glimpsing Michael Tippett, Bartók and Vaughan Williams, the set felt at the time like a pinnacle in the multi-talented Garland’s career. But now, in the Lighthouse Trio’s 20th anniversary year, the journey finds another peak with Ubuntu Records’ release of Moment of Departure, an even more ambitious Garland project that has been three years in the making.

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The set is a double-album, joining variously rocking, postboppish, dreamy, and rhythmically startling global-jazzy Garland pieces performed by the Lighthouse Trio (the composer plus Simcock and percussionist Asaf Sirkis). One piece features British-Bahraini trumpeter/composer Yazz Ahmed, a melodically audacious performer with a warm sound, occasionally reminiscent of Kenny Wheeler. The title track, ‘Moment of Departure’, is spun from improvisations by the trio plus the strings of the Britten Sinfonia, and the same combination performs the spirited Vivaldi homage ‘Approaching Winter’, for which the orchestra’s much-celebrated and improv-savvy leader Thomas Gould joins the soloists on violin. The similarly-orchestrated five-part suite ‘The Forever Seed’ – in essence a violin concerto with improvised interludes – is Garland’s first large-scale piece where a conductor’s baton replaces a saxophone.

“I’ve made a few albums using quite large ensembles, so I do feel more confident about that now, that’s for sure,” Garland says, when we catch up on the phone for UKJN. ‘This is probably the closest in format to Songs of the North Sky, but the birth of the Lighthouse Trio was 20 years ago, when I went into that lighthouse and recorded myself improvising, then wrote for the orchestra afterwards. I felt then that I really wanted to be joined by others, who could be my partners in crime from the improvisers’ side. That was the birth of the group. So I suppose this album is like saying ‘ok, let’s see what we’ve done in the last 20 years!’.”

The crowded personal schedules of all three band members have made Lighthouse get-togethers infrequent, but the advances they’ve all made separately have been spectacular. I suggest to Garland that they sound as intuitively integrated on Moment of Departure as they have all along, and that their individual advances in technique and the richness of their references seems to have brought them closer together rather than the opposite. We also consider similarities between this venture and Songs to the North Sky, in the ways that the freedoms of small-band improvisation and a classical orchestra’s need for order and structure can successfully be intertwined. So is the composer really unfolding one story, with If the Sea Replied, Songs to the North Sky and Moment of Departure separate chapters in it?

 “I guess it is all one story really, even if parts might appear quite disparate,” Garland says. “Maybe I wanted it all to be considered as a greater unity, even though I didn’t even know it – perhaps it’s just my kind of Libra personality. As a jazz musician, of course I’m very deeply into a spontaneous area; I could listen to Asaf and Gwilym improvise all day, they’re endlessly inventive at it. But then I find myself thinking, ‘what could I do from the other extreme?’ OK, I could maybe write a very tight arrangement for a whole orchestra, and then discover how the improvisers react to that, if we can be broad enough to be free within the greater unity of a music that’s both composed and improvised.”

“Listening back to this album now, I do think we’ve gone further with that than ever,” he continues. “I’ve never written such a big piece as ‘The Forever Seed’ with no saxophone on it, so it falls outside the jazz-oriented politics of music that has a saxophoney sound. Yet Thom Gould’s violin is both spontaneous and faithful to the score. He’s amazing. There was a place where I’d written a fiendish cadenza for him, which he got increasingly perfect as the takes went on, but I chose one of the early ones when he was getting used to it – I’m not after perfection, I’m after that raw as-if-it’s-the-first-time quality, and Thom understands that. The jazz composer leaves artful holes, and you know certain soloists will do some of their most exciting stuff in the gaps you leave for them.”

Moment of Departure was conceived as a single album, but the reconvening of the Lighthouse Trio changed all that. Garland still sounds both amused and incredulous as he recalls the events last autumn that made a single disc an impossibility. 

“About five minutes in, when we started rehearsing the trio again after several years off, I thought ‘my goodness, it sounds like we’ve just come off tour!’ And at that moment I realised, ‘uh-oh, this is going to have to be a double album.’ Gwilym and Asaf just bring so much to the table, so they’re the primary influences in terms of who I play with. I really wanted to express that in the title track, where we all freely improvised, recorded it, and then I wrote the strings parts retrospectively. Gwilym filmed it too, so you can see that process happening. We also did separate solo improvisations, which I joined digitally, and was surprised to discover how much like a simultaneous performance it sounded. And when I clothed all that with arrangements for the string orchestra, I found that even I couldn’t really tell where composition tails off into something completely different.”

Moment of Departure confirms how expressively Garland has honed and developed the rare art of situating the uninhibited spontaneity of world-class jazz and unorthodox-classical musicians, amid beautifully designed orchestral tapestries. But he’s at pains to make it clear that real-time improvisation can never be faked, or transcribed to sound as if it was happening there and then. 

“When you hear something truly improvised, there’s a particular vitality about it – a never-to-be-repeated in-the-moment magic,” Tim Garland says with some fervour. “Of course, great classical players can relive the magic of a wonderful concerto and keep bringing it to fresh life, but for me there’s nothing like that complete in-the-moment sense you get from improvisers. But in a funny way, of course, I suppose what I’ve gone on to do with the piece ‘Moment of Departure’ and others in the past, is to create something which by definition can never be performed!”

As this summer and autumn’s 20th anniversary Lighthouse tour approaches, Garland has found that its mix of a dozen trio gigs, three full orchestra concerts, and two quartet performances including Gould or Ahmed (Gould will take on the latter’s haunting trumpet part on the rapturous ‘Sub Vita’, but on electric violin and electronics), will mean significant rejigs of the music as played on the album. But that won’t bother the composer. His open-mindedness and long experience have consolidated his confidence in his craftsmanship, and a jazz musician’s expectation that every performance of the same pieces has a right to be different will do the rest. 

As we wind up, Garland reflects on the title of Moment of Departure, with its emphasis on pivotal triggers in life that can launch revelatory journeys. Many of those moments, in his working life as an improviser and a composer, have begun with his partners in the Lighthouse Trio, however irregular their meetings. 

“I suppose one aspect of the title is to throw into relief the things we do as a group, some of which are pastoral and ballad-like, and some that really show how much some improvisers love pushing themselves to the edge,” Garland says. “I’m always amazed by how extraordinary Gwilym and Asaf are at doing that. They raise themselves to that level so easily that I sometimes feel like the third person there, and I think ‘OK, I’m getting my arse kicked severely every time I walk through the door, and they’re just waiting for me to join in.’ But that’s just great for me. I’m always thinking, well, what am I going to learn today?”

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LINKS:

Tim Garland’s website

Lighthouse Trio tour dates

Tickets to Moment of Departure album launch at King’s Place, 30 May

Signed copies of Moment of Departure available via Bandcamp