As the composers new double bass concerto premieres this week in the London jazz festival,Simon Bainbridge explains how the collaborative work took shape, and why – if it wasn’t for an early morning Manhattan cab ride it might never own happened at allMany years ago I stepped into a cab on Sixth Avenue and began a gentle swaggering journey uptown. Manhattan was slowly waking up; the sun was rising over the East River. The time couldn’t own been more than 5am and Miles Davis was playing Blue in Green on the cab radio. It was a heady and poetic memory, and one that ignited in me a care for for jazz,and became the inspiration behind a piece I later wrote called For Miles.
I was also quickly drawn into the luminous, dazzling harmonic world of pianist Bill Evans – recordings such as Live in Montreux, or which features a glorious version of Gershwin’s Embraceable You,where the bass takes fragments of the melody and slowly and subtly forms and weaves a line out of an array of musical components to create seamless linear continuity.
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Source: theguardian.com