Composer finds inspiration in unexpected source

THE Jazz and Blues Festival in Scotland’s capital began its 40th anniversary programme yesterday, with the band led by drummer Ken Mathieson – the first director of Glasgow’s jazz festival – paying tribute to one of the musicians who started it all, Jelly Roll Morton.

That was appropriate for a festival that began as a celebration of traditional jazz in hostelries across the city during the Edinburgh Fringe, although the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival has long since moved to its own slot ahead of the capital’s August mayhem, and to the broadest possible definition of the music. Ideal partners though a pint of craft ale and a New Orleans band remain, the 2018 programme also contains music that is pushing jazz forward into new areas, with new compositions.

If Morton found inspiration in cocktails, dance and the local geography, saxophonist and composer Martin Kershaw has returned to the unlikely well-spring of the writings of David Foster Wallace for the work he premieres on Thursday in the Piccolo venue in Edinburgh’s George Square as part of the festival. Unlikely because the acclaimed modernist author of Infinite Jest appears to have had no particular consuming interest in music, far less jazz. Fans have located expressed fondness for specific tracks by REM and Alanis Morissette, and he also confessed to liking Enya – who he thought was Scottish – but it makes for slim pickings.

Nonetheless DFW has been memorialised in music by Kershaw, and the second half of Thursday’s concert will be a new work for eight-piece band that draws inspiration from Foster Wallace’s posthumously published novel The Pale King, entitled Dreaming of Ourselves. At around 45 minutes in length, two-thirds of it through-composed and the rest improvisation by the players, it is a big composition, commissioned by the festival with money from the Scottish Government’s Expo Fund. Implicit in that is the intention that it will be played and heard internationally, as well as at the other dates in Scotland Kershaw is already organising. The first half of the concert will comprise four Foster Wallace-inspired compositions for quartet that are already in the Kershaw canon: Eschaton, Peemster, Gately and And But So, all titles that will resonate for fans of the writer, who took his own life ten years ago.

“I just had this desire to do something to commemorate a writer who is very important to me,” says Kershaw, “but it does beg the question, ‘Where is the audience going to come from for this?’ so it is great that [jazz festival director] Roger Spence was interested enough to get the money together for it to happen.”

Unusually, for a man whose alto and clarinet playing is often an essential ingredient of the sound of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, the band leader will be playing tenor sax in the octet, with Adam Jackson on alto, Sean Gibbs on trumpet, trombonist Chris Grieve, guitarist Graeme Stephen, Paul Harrison on piano, bassist Calum Gourlay and drummer Doug Hough.

The quartet music, Kershaw says, is more programmatic “but it is not a soundtrack to his prose. With his mastery of language and breadth of knowledge, Foster Wallace was expressing the entire human experience, so all I am trying to do is pay tribute to a guy who covered an enormous amount of ground in his output.”

There are a few auspicious precedents in jazz, including Tommy Smith’s collaborations with Edwin Morgan and the classic Stan Tracey/Bobby Wellins response to Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, but Kershaw’s new work, even more than his earlier pieces, is much less closely tied to the text. In future, though, he’d like to expand its performance with readings by an actor – and has a well-known Scot in mind for the job.

With his mastery of language and breadth of knowledge, Foster Wallace expressed the entire human experience