The BBC Music Magazine Interview
THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
The British saxophonist has done more than anyone to showcase the versatility of his instrument and now, he tells Fiona Maddocks, he’s decided to take a look back at his career
Afrenzy of clearing, alphabetising and throwing away has, for some, been one of the few rewarding aspects of lockdown. It’s hard to imagine, in this respect, anyone outstripping the achievements of John Harle, saxophonist, composer, arranger, commissioner, producer, teacher, mentor and all-round musical wizard. Dazed, as so many musicians were, in the first weeks of cancellations and silence, he realised he had an epic and complex task on his doorstep: shelves, shoeboxes and cupboards groaning with stuff relating to his eclectic career. And only he could sort it.
‘I saw one thing immediately, back in March,’ he tells me, speaking via Zoom from his home in rural Kent. ‘As everyone started a steep learning-curve on digital communications, the thing that could continue unaltered in a way that other music making couldn’t was recording and producing. Plans I had at the back of my head forged to the front, including the idea to attack my sound archive as a project.’
And that included creating a 20-album collection embracing the full scope of his interests, from opera and classical music to jazz, film scores and collaborations with artists including Elvis Costello, Marc Almond, Herbie Hancock, Paul Mccartney and – famously in the case of the 1995
Last Night of the Proms premiere Panic, in which Harle was soloist (see box, p37) – Harrison Birtwistle. The result is the
John Harle Collection, spanning his work as player and producer from 1977-2016. He calls it a ‘sonic autobiography’ but it has another important function. ‘I realised I could give the money to charity. It gave me energy and freedom to do exactly what I wanted. There’s no winning, or having to be the big “I am”.’ All proceeds will go to Help Musicians Coronavirus Financial Hardship Fund, created to help musicians with the financial pressures they may face as a result of COVID.
Harle has always collected recordings of his performances. The challenge was to make sense of hundreds of hours of material – recent, vintage, studio, live, with his band, with others – faithfully saved on every conceivable format. The list is itself a kind of archaeology of four decades of recording techniques: multitrack analogue tape, quarter-inch analogue, cassette, DAT, DA8 and old WAVS. ‘I saw this archive as a resource, which should be free to musicians, rather than a series of albums,’ Harle explains. ‘I would have put it on my own website – little heard, unknown music, things that had value but which hadn’t been unearthed for a while. Of course it’ll all be available via the usual streaming services but I thought it’s a good opportunity to ask people to make a donation for some or all of these albums to help performers.’ There will be a limited edition set of CDS, but albums will be available individually as downloads.
If made to sum up his multi-disciplinary existence, Harle now regards himself as a composer-producer. ‘I’m still happy to perform but I see it as part of a bigger picture. The instinct is less sharp, the ego needed to get up there and do it isn’t like it was. I’ve entered a more thoughtful phase,’ he laughs. ‘I can offer more to other people.’ He is a willing mentor, especially through his work at London’s Guildhall School of Music where his various roles include professor of music and interdisciplinary practice, director of the Leadership Academy, and professor of saxophone. He has taught Jess Gillam since she was 15, written two concertos for her and produced the young saxophonist’s first album for Decca: ‘She’s totally the next thing.’
He attributes his relentless work ethic to his upbringing. Born the older of two brothers in Newcastle upon Tyne in
1956, he had a comfortable childhood, overshadowed by family tragedy. Harle’s grandfather had been a Tyneside shipyard worker with Swan Hunter and died after an industrial accident. His father turned to business as a way to escape poverty and find a better life for himself.
‘But what I suppose you’d call the northern working-class work ethic was always there,’ Harle recalls. His mother, before marriage and family, had been a singer and dancer in ENSA
– the Entertainments National Service Association set up in 1939 to entertain the British troops during World War II – working with the likes of actor Ralph Reader and comedian Tony Hancock. Did she dance and sing around the kitchen? ‘She danced and sang around the kitchen, yes!’ Both parents were jazz fans, ‘all sorts, but they were very into cool, modern jazz’.
A turning point in Harle’s musical life came at 17. Adolescence had been bumpy: he had run away from a strict, Catholic boarding school, but was finding his feet, musically and scholastically, at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle ‘which was a lot nicer’. He’d already been playing clarinet and saxophone for a few years when his father took him to Westminster Abbey to hear Duke Ellington.
‘That was the moment I decided to become a musician. It was Ellington’s final UK concert. Things were running late. They were due to start in five minutes and were still rehearsing so they delayed the concert. We had seats in the choir stalls. Lots of famous people were there – I remember walking past Edward Heath, then prime minister, and Lauren Bacall! I went straight up to Duke Ellington and said “Excuse me maestro, can I have your autograph?”. And he looked at me and said, “You’ve got guts kid, coming up like this. Are you a musician?”. I said “I think so”. He took me off to meet the saxophone players in the band and I’ve never in my life experienced a more charismatic personality. Just being in his presence for 15 minutes tipped the scales for me, and I began to see my schooling as a hindrance.’
After the Royal College of Music,
Harle won a scholarship to study in Paris
‘Listening back,
I’m most impressed with myself between 1983 and 1995’
with the saxophonist Daniel Deffayet. Various awards followed and, back in the UK, Harle was soon playing with the Michael Nyman Band and working at the National Theatre with Harrison Birtwistle and Dominic Muldowney: three entirely different composers, all of whom gave full rein to Harle’s virtuosity and versatility. Given the strands he was exploring – minimalism, theatre, modernism, jazz – did Harle see himself in any one category? ‘I was split. The saxophonist inhabits music’s shadowlands. The otherness of the saxophone is part of my make-up, and it’s affected most of my decisions. Because I’m a combination – classical training, jazz instinct – I guess I was seeking a coherence in what was then [the 1980s] the unholy mess of cross-over music.’
It’s easy to forget just how entrenched attitudes were, how much animosity there was from the contemporary classical music world towards the new ascendancy of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Nyman was the UK’S own minimalist, winning popular success through his film scores. You can hear Harle on soprano sax (he plays both parts, by overdubbing) on that enduring Nyman hit, ‘Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds’ from Peter Greenaway’s film The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982). ‘John? Wonderful player. Terrible taste in music,’ Birtwistle told me when I rang to ask about Harle. Yet he said it with a chuckle as if it were a running joke between the two. ‘He’s a brilliant musician. Only he could have done Panic. That’s that.’
Surely things are easier now, and attitudes have softened? ‘That’s true,’ says Harle. ‘People really did care about it back then, but I don’t think the problem’s been solved – there’s more acceptance of different styles of music, but there’s a lack of quality.’ Meaning? ‘Too many projects are commercially driven, not musically driven, by big record labels.’ He wants to see a more democratic future, in which smaller labels and venues have more artistic currency.
‘COVID has been an interesting time as we all look at the musical world and try to imagine what the medium- and long-term outlook will be,’ he reflects. ‘I’m pretty sure that there will be a higher percentage of young musicians who see production as a part of their skill-set. And with this growth in the amount of music produced, there’s a new opportunity for high-quality music in all genres, including classical. Musicians who can stay ahead of the curve and anticipate trends in the distribution of music could be the new musical leaders.’ Meanwhile, Harle has a concert work and a TV film score to compose, and lockdownbruised students at Guildhall to inspire. They could do worse than check out The John Harle Collection.
‘Listening back to everything, I’m most impressed with myself between 1983 and 1995,’ he laughs. ‘It’s when you just didn’t give a f***, when nothing mattered apart from how well you could play. It’s a person I almost don’t recognise now.’ Where has that person gone? ‘Well, when you get older things become more complicated don’t they? But I’m still here, busy as ever.’
The 20-album John Harle Collection is out now on Sospiro Records