Page 241 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

On Dappled Light, I comment that the colours of the cover and match up to Luke Howard’s
music rather nicely. “I think he wrote beautifully for the forces that we had”, says Gillam,
“and the way he used the percussion was really interesting with the piano. It really paints a
picture and a scene I think. The cover art wasn’t planned but we ended up with it because of
lockdown. I think it went together really well!”
Jess has a number of new commissions under her belt already. Does she feel it is important
for a new composer to capture her personality as well as writing well for the saxophone
itself? “I think for me music is all about people, about telling people stories and
communication”, she says. “It is a deep level of communication and conveying a story, an
emotion or a feeling. I think with whatever piece it is – a Mahler symphony or a
Shostakovich string quartet for instance – each one has a history that is linked to a
particular person. I find the interpersonal relationships interesting, to find out that music a
lot of the time is about people, for people or with somebody in mind. It is really nice to have
that human interaction and quality to a new piece, but it’s not essential. I think it’s really
nice when a composer listens to your sound and captures that, but I think it’s nice and not
essential.”

While listening through the album, the big surprise for this particular listener was Gillam’s
cover of James Blake’s Retrograde, in an arrangement by Benjamin Rimmer. The surprise
in this case was the vocal qualities of the instrument. “I think it’s an underrated element of
the saxophone, it’s almost insane the vocal quality that it has! The way a sound is produced
is quite akin to how you would sing, and quite similar to how you would produce the sound
if you were a singer, and the things you would think about where the sound is being made
are similar through your vocal chords. Whatever you put through the saxophone is a direct
representation of how sound comes out. If you’re shouting or whispering, it would be totally
different. You get that to some extent on a piano, but it is so connected to our bodies and the
physicality of it is just like singing. When I was recording Retrograde it was about looking at
how James Blake had got that sound, and replicating some of it on the saxophone.”
Jess has shown through her concerts how adaptable the saxophone can be, showing in an
hour-long recital at Wigmore Hall how composers from the last 400 years can find their
music in a new dimension. “It is unbelievably versatile, and I have been saying for a while
how it’s like a chameleon of instruments. I was reading the famous David Bowie quote
where he says people describe him as a chameleon but he’s not a chameleon of styles,
because a chameleon puts a lot of effort into changing its colour! It’s the same with the
saxophone, you don’t really have to change that much. Of course there is a whole different
set of equipment and techniques to play jazz and classical, and you can learn to do it very
well, but on a very basic level you don’t need to change anything to be able to play baroque
music or Motown or classical, whatever it might be. It has the versatility of sitting right in
that hole.”

She may be two albums in, but Jess is still at a very early point in her career – which is
something of a double-edged sword. “It’s amazing but also terrifying!” she exclaims. “There
is so much to explore with the instruments. The way we consume music now means that
people have such eclectic tastes, because you can listen to whatever you like whenever you
like on a streaming platform, and you don’t have to sit down and listen to a whole album
before getting up and changing the gramophone. It’s a lot easier listening to music now, so
the styles we like and are listening to I find are much more based on mood and what we
feed our emotions, to inspire or to concentrate. I think people are using music in quite a
different way now. The saxophone feels like an instrument that has the potential to sit in so
many different places and to explore so many new possibilities. There is so much music still