Page 82 - Alison Balsom Quiet City FULL BOOK

This recording feels like a delicious melting of those boundaries – Gershwin, Copland and
Bernstein wouldn’t call themselves jazz composers, but they had a great respect for jazz, and
likewise Gil Evans and Miles Davis had an immense respect for the classical canon. Evans
orchestrated in a very classical way and Gershwin wrote in a very jazzy way, and I wanted to
focus on the place in the middle where they meet: mid-twentieth-century America was a kind
of paradise for the trumpet, because jazz was exploding and the composers were travelling
internationally and being really open-minded with their conversations with each other, and
that’s what the album celebrates. As someone who would probably be described as a classical
trumpet-player who loves jazz, it felt like this was an honest and authentic place for me to get
involved.

How much input did you have into the wonderful

new version of Rhapsody in Blue?

It was a bit of team effort, although Simon Wright did the lion’s share of the whole thing –
he’s the one who deserves all the credit for the fact that it actually works! My idea was not to
remove the piano part, just to intersperse the trumpet line with it, and still have the big
orchestra with jazz band – the works! When I found out that the piece was out of copyright I
was all ready to go…but it turned out that it was only two-piano original, not the Grofé
orchestration!

So I went to Simon and my friend Tom Poster, and explained what I had in mind: at first they
both thought I was nuts, but after about fifteen minutes they got where I was going with it!
That meant doing an entirely new orchestration, and anything that sounds similar to the Grofé
has been arrived at from the piano duet original – it’s just coincidence that Simon happened
to make the same decision as the original orchestrator.

I always knew exactly what I wanted to be playing, with the exception of that great opening
tune – initially I said ‘I’m not going to play that, I think we’ll leave it in the orchestra…’ But
eventually I changed my mind: come on, you can’t do all these fireworks and acrobatics and
then pass that up! Tom also enjoyed the opportunity to rework some of his part, and then we
gave it to a couple of great arrangers to get their feedback.

I tried to do something similar with the Copland too - I want those cor anglais lines for
myself! I knew there was an early version for eight musicians where the trumpet-part was
bigger, so I went to the publishers and asked if I could explore a version where the trumpet
does more, but sadly they said no! With Bernstein there were a couple of cor anglais lines in
the background, and I just put those on the trumpet – the trumpet voice becomes a bit more
consistent through the track, but the basics are essentially the same.

This is the first of five planned new albums with

Warner Classics – can you share any details about

what’s next?