Page 71 - Alison Balsom Quiet City FULL BOOK

incredible working with the Britten Sinfonia as well, they have great integrity and are
always minded for collaboration. I worked with them in 2017, when we did the Barbican’s
Sound Unbound festival. We did Miles Davis and Gil Evans’ Sketches Of Spain, using
transcriptions from the original studio recordings. I didn’t realise about the manuscripts,
and there was a trumpet part revealed to me. He knew exactly what he wanted! I felt
privileged to hear the players as at home playing jazz as they do classical.”

Also featured in the Sound Unbound concert was Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, which
appears on Balsom’s album in a very different guise – tastefully rejigged to bring the
trumpet forward as a second soloist, alongside childhood friend Tom Poster on the piano.
“I had a different hat on for this one!” she confesses. “I respect Tom so much, I think he’s the
greatest pianist to play with. We met when I was ten, so we know each other really well.
With the arrangement I phoned him up and suggested it, and he thought it was nuts but a
good idea. We found that Rhapsody in Blue was out of copyright, but not in the Grofé
arrangement. This made the job an enormous one for Simon Wright, who orchestrated it
from scratch. Any coincidences in the new version are Simon coming to the same
conclusion as Grofé, and I think it is an amazing achievement. The piano part didn’t have to
be set in stone, which gave Tom the opportunity to express himself even more. We did a
concert in Norwich, when everything was closed, and we only had to get it right once to get
it in the can.”