Page 89 - Alison Balsom Quiet City FULL BOOK

Alison Balsom at the recording sessions (photo: Hugh Carswell)

The rest of the album unfolds from there. First we step into the melancholy evening

air of Bernstein’s ‘Lonely Town’ pas de deux, which is followed by the more
flamboyant virtuosity of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, then Ives’s The Unanswered
Question, and finally the arrangements by Gil Evans for Miles Davis of a movement

from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez and Weill’s ‘My Ship’.

Of the project’s origins, Balsom recalls, ‘I went to my usual place and said to myself:
“Let me show the world how versatile the trumpet is, and I’m going to cover every

possible American theme and idea: musicals, films, contemporary, classical, jazz,
folk … – and then I calmed down and thought, “This isn’t a lecture recital, it’s an
album, and you can say just one thing rather than 6000 things.” But I was interested

to see what there was in the canon that would show the trumpet in the way that I
wanted to on this album.’ Which was how? ‘I wanted it all to feel quite inward-

looking,’ she says, noting that even Rhapsody in Blue has moments of serene
beauty. And while it’s true that on so much of the album the trumpet is both elegiac

and reflective, in a moving way it also retains the role in which it’s so often cast – that