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Live Music Now!
The LSQ are proud to be members of the Live Music Now! scheme. With the scheme they have toured North Wales, Lincolnshire and represented the scheme at many festivals across the UK.
About Live Music Now!
LMN is the largest provider of live music to the UK’s welfare, educational, justice and health sectors, with a unique resource of specially trained musicians. For over thirty years, LMN has been putting into practice the visionary ideals of its founder, Yehudi Menuhin and Ian Stoutzer; bringing the joy and inspiration of live music to those who have limited access to conventional music-making, and helping to develop the careers of young talented musicians.
LMN’s music programmes (comprising over 3,000events each year) deliver social, emotional, physical and education benefits to participants of all ages and abilities through the promotion of:
Active Engagement – supporting social cohesion, teamwork, participation;
Life Skills – developing confidence, communication, transferable skills;
Health and Wellbeing – effecting positive improvements in mental and physical health;
Professional development – training musicians and staff in the welfare, educational, justice and health sectors in delivery of music outreach.
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 next CD FLUX will feature new works by Graham Fitkin, Andrew Poppy, Michael Nyman 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
LSQ New Music Award
The LSQ are passionate about commissioning new music. The group felt that with such a wealth of compositional talent at Universities and Conservatoires, these students should have a platform to write for the saxophone quartet genre and showcase their works.
The competition sees students submit previously unperformed works to a yearly changing criteria. The pieces are shortlisted and a live final at The Warehouse in London sees the pieces performed by the LSQ to a panel of expert judges which in the past have included Graham Fitkin, Andy Scott, Gabriel Jackson, Andrew Poppy and Sarah Field.
The LSQ New Music Award is now in its third year with previous winners including James Williamson (RAM), Mark David Boden (RWCMD) and Benjamin Tubb (RNCM).
The next competition final will take place in November 2010 with entries being accepted from April 2010 – August 2010. Competition guidelines and application forms will be available to download from this page from Jan 2010.