Page 94 - Alison Balsom Quiet City FULL BOOK

justify a revisit. ‘It seems so instantaneous,’ she says of the original album. ‘You can
hear that the band have been given their music that day, and they’ve turned on the

red light – but I think, just because that happened, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth
exploring again. And because what they came up with was so good, you have to

come at it from a more formal angle, and get those players who are brilliant at
classical and jazz (which the Britten Sinfonia are), those people who understand
both worlds, and get hold of the sheet music, and explore it and see what happens. I

think the material deserves that re-exploration. That was so iconic, and such a
complex creation: all the parts were written out, it was all orchestrated. It’s just too

interesting not to explore further.’

Did the fact that it’s a work best known from a single recording affect how she
approached it? ‘I think the fact that I knew the piece in its recorded version and it
spoke to me meant I already knew that I had something I could bring, that I wouldn’t

be copying what they did but would be playing what he had composed to go over the
top of the orchestral parts from my own heart.’

The score Balsom played from draws on Gil Evans’s manuscripts, as well as

transcriptions from the original studio recording and more recently unearthed
outtakes from the sessions, plus subsequent live performances by Miles Davis. ‘I
tried to learn as much about both the rigour and freedom that would help me play it

in the style in which it is written. It was certainly a new way for me to approach a
recording, but it didn’t feel completely different, because I was still sticking to the

score first and foremost. Other trumpeters have performed this work before me and
after Miles Davis, but coming from a classical background, I decided it wasn’t

necessary for me to improvise freely around the orchestra, but I stuck close to the
“whole” of the Miles Davis “composition”. Primarily I hoped and aspired to play

something of which Gil Evans might have approved.’