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Catching Sunlight
‘Sometimes words are not enough. Sometimes you just have to listen, let the music catch you and carry you with it. Sometimes the music is everything. Catching Sunlight has everything.
The Lunar Saxophone Quartet and pianist/composer Dave Stapleton’s album Catching Sunlight is filled with gorgeous melodies, drenched in sensual harmonies and driven by subtle, shifting rhythms and strange, exotic time signatures.
New Music group, the Lunar Saxophone Quartet, commissioned Stapleton to write a long work in 2007 for four saxophones and piano. Catching Sunlight is the result. As the work progressed, it became clear that doing it justice required a greater number of voices to allow its rich and glorious colours and tones to emerge. The answer was simple – a full Jazz rhythm section using Stapleton’s regular musical partners bassist Paula Gardiner and drummer Elliot Bennett with the addition of trumpeter Neil Yates.
Yates was an inspired choice – not only is he a formidable and gifted improviser, he is also a master of texture with one of the purest, most beautiful brass sounds in British Jazz. Stapleton uses him both as principle voice but also as a contrast to the softer, reedier sounds of the saxophones, just as the improvisation contrasts with the strong written material that underpins it. Each of these eleven tracks unfolds like the next movement in a symphony, as Stapleton draws on a staggering breadth of compositional ideas and influences. Most remarkable of all, is the way that this young composer shows how extended composition in Jazz can be both cerebral but still ‘retain the Funk’, to use George Russell’s well-chosen phrase.
The Lunar Saxophone Quartet aim to bring new music to the widest possible audience without pandering or patronising. Their standards are exacting and they only commission the best. Their albums These Visions and Flux feature new works by the UK’s most sought after composers including Graham Fitkin, , Michael Nyman, Keith Tippett, John Metcalf, Hilary Tann and Gabriel Jackson. With Catching Sunlight they succeed on all counts and Dave Stapleton joins this august company.
The titles for these pieces are taken from a poem by Julie Tippetts. Each line somehow capturing the mood of its piece. As The Lunar Saxophone Quartet weave and intertwine these delightful dancing melodies over the rhythm section’s steady, supple pulse and Neil Yates’ trumpet floats above the ensemble. There are so many delights to be discovered in Catching Sunlight. Words, however, well-chosen are sometimes simply not enough.’