This month: Marius Neset
With an expansive and varied discography and an impressive list of live performance associates that ranges from Django Bates to the London Sinfonietta, the distinctive sound of Norwegian Marius Neset’s saxophone runs the gamut from bouncing energy to lyrical pastoralism.
As a composer, his work recently took yet another turn with Manmade, a piece that gives its name to a set of orchestral compositions released on Chandos. He explains: ‘Some years ago I was asked to do a commission for the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, which was to be a saxophone concerto with me as the soloist. That was premiered in 2020, the day before everything shut down! It was a great success and I was then asked to compose some more music for the orchestra.’
So how does he address the process of orchestral composition? ‘I’ve been composing for large ensembles for the past ten years or so and I’ve done several projects with the London Sinfonietta. It needs a totally different approach. When composing for jazz musicians I always hear the drums in my head (I started out as a drummer) and what I’ve always found interesting is to take all the rhythmic tensions and subdivisions you find in a drum part and placing them in different areas within the orchestra, which I think works really well. It makes the music really rhythmic and very lively, but not in such a way that you miss the presence of a drummer.
‘I’m fundamentally an improviser, so I’ve orchestrated around a lot of saxophone lines that were originally improvised, including a kind of duet with the violins. It made that section sound more like a concerto than a jazz improvisation, yet it still has that kind of energy in it.’
One approach to this kind of music involves bringing a jazz band onstage as well as orchestral resources, but for this project Neset was keen to avoid this: ‘I didn’t want the orchestra to just sound like a rhythm section, but to use all those instruments as they were meant to be used.’ Roger Thomas
‘I didn’t want the orchestra to just sound like a rhythm section…’