Output details

Flight

Research content/process:

Stapleton’s Flight project brings together a jazz quartet (piano, tenor saxophone, bass and drums) with a classical string quartet specifically to blur and merge the interplay between improvised (jazz quartet) and fully-notated (string quartet ) music. The project furthermore brought together Finnish and Norwegian musicians with those from the British Isles, which adds a further perspective to the rationalisation of oppositions that lies behind the project. Accordingly, the project progressed by means of heavily notated passages for strings while providing more skeletal harmonic indications for the jazz ensemble: modal points, root notes and upper structures. But this overall opposition between composition and improvisation is tempered by the more general possibilities created by the use of eight very different instruments in terms of texture, colour, groove, resonance, architecture and landscape. The largest range of compositional possibilities arose from the harmonic possibilities of the different traditions represented by the performing groups. Northern-European modal approaches are much in evidence, for example in the piano trio section of ‘North Wind’, whereas much of the piano writing takes its harmonic cue from such bitonal techniques as the superimposition of two unrelated triads. Further rationalisations of opposition lay in music that emerged from a set of controlled improvisations on the one hand, and on Stapleton’s imaginary sound world that was realised in rehearsal with the entire ensemble. The collision between the two musical worlds extended into the performances themselves as the project had to rationalise different approaches to rubato, and to playing before, on or after the beat, as exemplified in the ballad in ‘Henryk’.