Tim Garland has become known as a unique polymath in the UK’s music scene: Video

19.10. – Happy Birthday !!! Throughout an international career starting in the late 1980’s, Tim Garland has become known as a unique polymath in the UK’s music scene.

His first break as saxophonist was joining Ronnie Scotts band age 23. Later he was to join Chick Corea as a regular member of several globe-trotting projects over a seventeen year period including The Vigil. Playing tenor and soprano saxes, bass clarinet and flute, he also won a Grammy for his symphonic orchestrations on Corea’s “The New Crystal Silence” album from 2007.

‘There is no one who can more convincingly unite the jazz and European classical music idioms’.

Garland has fulfilled commissions from several of the worlds top orchestras, including a double concerto from the LSO, a piano concerto for Gwilym Simcock from The Royal Northern Sinfonia, with whom he went on to record three CDs, a cello and sax concerto from the CBSO, and a sax concerto from the BBC Concert Orchestra.

His concert works continue to celebrate the fertile ground between modern composition and jazz. Whilst his creative arranging skills have won much praise from such diverse artists as Jean Luc Ponty, John Patitucci, The Royal Holloway and Westminster Choirs, the Catalan National Cobla Group, the LPO, the London Session Orchestra, NYJO as well as Chick Corea.

His work is often inspired by, but not limited to, the jazz idiom, whilst his celebrated virtuosity as a saxophonist maintains his position as one the UK’s most unique and authentic jazz voices.

In 2016 he premiered “Re:Focus” (a re-imagining of the Getz /Sauter project of 1962 ‘Focus’) to a full house at London’s Wigmore Hall, and also his “Luca’s Winter”, a 100 minute work for big band, orchestra and narrator at Manchester’s Royal Northern College Of Music where he held an international post as research fellow.

As a band leader and co-leader he is responsible for the much of the output of the groups; Lammas, The Underground Orchestra, Storms / Nocturnes (feat. Joe Locke and Geoffrey Keezer) , Acoustic Triangle, the last few years of Bill Bruford’s Earthworks, and Lighthouse, (feat; Gwilym Simcock and Asaf Sirkis).

There’s nothing quite like Tim Garland’s music, with its three strands of jazz, classical and folk woven in ever-changing and surprising patterns. In this case, we have a string orchestra of up to 35 players, some superb jazz soloists, notably Garland himself, and traditional song from north-west England.

The music is an evocation of the Lake District in its various seasons and moods. There’s a certain resistance, even now, to the mixing of strings and jazz, but the richness and variety of these 12 pieces should banish such prejudice: bassist Yuri Goloubev soloing to an ethereal background of two violins; the earthy sound of Garland’s tenor saxophone declaiming the haunting melody of The Snows They Melt the Soonest; the boldly expansive playing of both pianists, Jason Rebello and Pablo Held.

Everything fits with such perfection, you would never guess that their improvised solos were added to the previously recorded ensemble. Garland makes the point that people nowadays often experience orchestral music first through film soundtracks, which may stimulate the imagination when listening to music like this. His soundscapes certainly present us with atmospheres and images subtler than any picture.