Matthew Halsall Ears Exclusive mix & the rest of the Talks!

Our Tim's a man of diverse tastes… last week he sat down with Matthew Halsall. A Manchester based trumpeter Halsall who's one of the brighter talents of recent times. A gifted trumpeter with a beautiful, expressive tone, his music draws on his love of the transcendental, spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane, Yuseef Lateef and Pharoah Sanders, the modal jazz of Miles Davis and classic Blue Note recordings, as well as more contemporary dance music and electronica. You can't say you don't get it all here at R$N towers. 
Take it away Mr Wilson…

The first thing I wanted to ask you about, concerning the album, was the Gilles Peterson award, what was receiving that like?
It was amazing actually, I just asked a friend if I could get in for the event anyway as I went the year before and really enjoyed it. I didn’t actually know I’d won a Worldwide award so I just went down and was just having a drink with some of my mates and someone told me that, yeah, in about half an hour you need to go on stage and collect the award. I couldn’t believe it, it was amazing…

So you were gonna go there anyway, and just heard your name called…
Yeah, the lineup was great that day. I’m a big fan of The Pyramids, the spiritual jazz band who also won an award, and Michael Kiwanuka was playing and it was just a great lineup.

Have you noticed much of a change since the award; more exposure generally?
Yeah, I mean, every time we have even a radio play on any of the BBC’s you notice the difference and then to win an award aswell it really lifted the whole release, so yeah, it’s been good.

I’m listening to the latest one a lot actually. But, I’m kind of a novice with jazz, having only started listening in the last few years but two terms that seemed to continually arise a lot were modal and spiritual. For someone like me, do you want to give a little summary, what they are firstly and how they’re manifested in your own music?
Well, modal basically means even though you have various chords throughout a piece of music there’s one scale that is used throughout that piece that is the modal scale so a lot of the classic 60s Blue Note ones, a lot of them are modal jazz records. That’s my favourite stuff like Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’, like all of those ones are modal. And with spiritual, it’s kind of a term that’s been become more and more used over the last couple of years actually. Last five years it’s just blown up a bit. My interpretation of spiritual jazz is when you mix all sorts of instrumentation from all over the world and it’s got a kind of meditative quality to it, normally quite a lot of bells and percussion, floaty sounds…it just has this kind of…feeling of meditation.

So, not strictly religious but cosmic.
Yeah, yeah.

Ok! That gives me an idea. So, people like Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, would you say they were big influences?
I would say, definitely Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Yuseef Lateef, they come across in my music and I love their music. Then I’m really into modern music aswell, so people like Miguel Atwood Ferguson and Cinematic Orchestra and people like that, the way they’ve stripped down jazz and sampled jazz, in particular Cinematic Orchestra’s ‘Motion’ album, it sounds really fresh and beautiful, the way take maybe 4 to 8 bars of a jazz tune and loop it and then add textures and sounds over the top of it.

Is that also a kind of hip hop element going on as I know Miguel Atwood has done live interpretations of J Dilla?
Yeah, they’re both approaching it from a kind of sample orientated music creation so Cinematic come from the hip hop, MPC, sampling kind of world…and I love that type of music, I’m really fascinated by the way that they can create music that way and make it sound so beautiful.

Back to the album, it’s named after a park in Manchester, ‘Fletcher Moss Park’, what prompted that, any particular experiences?
Well, I like writing music all over the place. I take my laptop on the train with me, I go to parks, I go to old man’s pubs, wherever I can get a nice spot and relax and be away from the internet and other distractions so I go to Fletcher Moss Park quite a lot, there’s a café at the top of the park and I just get a cup of tea and sit and make music and look down at all the Botanical gardens and then I’ll go and sit in another spot and write another tune. Just write outside cause it frees my mind to be away from my daily routine of being in an office as I run my label at home so I get really distracted when I’m composing at home so I tend to compose out in a nice location somewhere or I’ll compose really, really late at night and switch the internet off and work from like 12 till 6 in the morning in my house without any distractions so that’s the way I write.

So, this work (on the laptop) what does that usually involve; just honing things, in terms of production?
I use software like logic and I have a load of beautiful sample libraries of double bass’, harps, drums, piano and I just write down the main sort of structure of the tune, compose it, score it out, I then write it out for the musicians and record it in the studio a couple of months later. I pick my favourite ones of the sketches, develop them and take them into the studio.

Yeah, I was watching one of the videos, ‘The Sun in September’. It seems like a lot of people are involved (when it gets to the studio) but it’s quite seamless…
[Laughs] Yeah, I mean it was crazy when I got into the studios sometimes cause of the cost. I hired a really nice studio for that particular recording session and yeah, I think I had about, (on the album) maybe 11 musicians. So, you’ve got to map out the whole recording session, who’s doing what at certain times cause when musicians are sat around they start losing concentration and getting pissed off with you so yeah it was quite a handful to deal with but the end product turned out really good.

Incidentally, not to use any hyperbole, the first track on ‘Fletcher Moss Park’ it kind of reminded me of ‘Springtime Again’ on Sun Ra’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Quite pastoral…
Yeah, I mean I love Sun Ra…

I’m not as into the crazy, wild sort of bebop stuff…
No, I’m not as wild as Sun Ra at all really, and I don’t drive round in spaceships and think I’m from another planet [laughs] but there’s an album called ‘Lanquidity’ by Sun Ra, that’s a beautiful album, that’s my favourite.

I noticed aswell in some of the later tracks, ‘Sailing Out to Sea’ for example, there’s tinges of Eastern elements to it, is that part of the Alice Coltrane influence or…?
Yeah, I mean it’s a combination of things really. I studied Maharishi transcendental meditation, Buddhist meditation and I go to events like involved in those types of things and they’re always quite Eastern philosophies and I get feelings and react to things that I’ve read and it makes me want to make music in that sort of style so maybe it’s from that. Obviously listening to Alice Coltrane who was into meditation, it kind of gives you an idea of where you could go with the music.

Yeah. So, I also wanted to ask you about your roots. What was your first direct experience with jazz?
I mean my family are kind of arty musos and my granddad was an organ/piano player and he used to look after me when they were working and he would be always playing music on his piano or organ and playing records. He introduced me to quite a lot of jazz and my parents introduced me to jazz. We used to go to a jazz club once a month on a Sunday and when I was six I saw a jazz big band play for the first time and I really liked it, I pointed to the trumpet players and said that’s what I want to do when I’m older cause they just looked like they were having so much fun, messing about, being cheeky on stage and it was basically that moment that I realized I could make a career out of this and have a lot of fun in the process.

Were there any trumpet players in particular, around that time, obviously you’ve mentioned Miles Davis, but were there any English/British trumpet players?
Well, I didn’t really discover a massive amount of British trumpet players till a later date actually, through the Gilles Peterson Brit Jazz stuff he did…Ian Carr and people like that. But I guess there were always really good trumpet players around when I was growing up but they’re not like big names that you would know, they’re just players that would play in other bands and session work, so they inspired me to start with, as well as Miles and Chet Baker and Dizzy (Gillespie) and all those people. But you know, it didn’t matter who it was at the time, as long as they were good at what they did.

And when you were getting into the formative, teenage years, were there any places in Manchester you liked to go, like jazz places or otherwise…?
Yeah, I mean I really liked going to Mr Scruff’s night, it used to be at a place called Planet K, back in like ’98/’99, I used to go down there. He introduced me to Pharaoh Sanders actually cause he was playing ‘You’ve Got to Have Freedom’ and I was like ‘What’s this?’ ‘I’ve gotta get this, gotta find this’ and I went and found it in a record shop and then I found a track called ‘Blue Nile’ with Alice and Pharoah together and that lead me to the ‘Journey into Satchindananda’ album…

So it just snowballed…

Yeah, it snowballed from all of that so yeah that was one of the key places, and there’s a jazz club called Matt Fred’s that I used to hang out in all the time and that’s where I met pretty much maybe fifty/sixty per cent of the musicians I work with now.

Nice. Yeah, Mr Scruff’s still going strong…
Yeah, he’s a really nice guy as well, I’ve met him quite a lot of times now and we get on really well and he keeps lending me all these crazy jazz records.

Yeah, I’ve seem him a few times in Sheffield, and he’d go through so many genres, starting off with afro-beat and then changing…
Yeah, I mean, he’s one of my hero’s, him and Gilles Peterson are two people who’ve introduced me to so many different styles of music and as a record label owner, I’ve been inspired by them to be really open-minded with what I create and what artists I sign.

You’ve also done a mix for us…
(Laughs) Well, I’ve had a nightmare couple of weeks, my turntables broke and my laptops on its last legs, the screen’s broke so I’m kind of looking at it with a flashlight on it trying to see all the folders on my desktop but I have got a series of tunes that I want to put together, I mean I’ve been buying hundreds of records ready for mixes and I really want to do it…

Well, yeah, no rush! The main thing was I believe it was going to be more electronic…
Yeah, my record collection is completely the broadest it could be really. I listen to all the Warp and Ninja Tune records stuff and then I listen to all the Strut and Jazzman…

Jazzman, that’s the one with the Spiritual Jazz compilations, isn’t it?
Yeah, and also (along with them) Gilles’ Brownswood label, all of those types of labels I buy a lot of stuff from and I love hip hop aswell….

Well, considering this I was thinking that at the moment there seems to be a fusion, a lot of jazz and electronic, well there is a guy who’s obviously been doing it for a while, Matthew Herbert…
Yeah, Herbert’s one of my heroes aswell, the ‘Bodily Functions’ album, just a beautiful album.

Yeah, what’s that track, it’s on the Gilles Peterson compilation…?
‘Suddenly’, or…’The Audience’?

‘The Audience’! I watched it live the other day (only youtube sadly),but still….just amazing.But yeah, there’s a lot of people propagating that kind of fusion, Brandt Brauer Frick, and likewise, as more of a dance orientated thing, Floating Points, what do you think makes each of them (jazz and electronica) so seemingly compatible with the other?
Yeah, I mean I think it’s down to the individuals being really open-minded, like, for instance you’ve got Flying Lotus sampling Alice Coltrane, even Cinematic Orchestra sampling Alice Coltrane and Elvin Jones and all those jazz records. There’s just this…Maybe back in the day, people made rock’n’roll and that’s all they were into or they would make reggae or something but now everyone’s like, I’m into jazz, I’m into electronica, I’m into hip hop, they’re bringing it all together. I mean Ninja (Tune) is a classic example of that from the point of view of sampling, like most of the tracks on there will sample a hip hop record, like just a bit of an acapella, and then they’ll have a jazz loop, and then they’ll have this funk groove…so it’s just mashing it all together into this new sound. And our generation have listened to nothing but this kind of melting pot of music from all genres so the next generation, I think, they’re all going to be making music without any barriers really.

So, yeah, internet playing a big part in breaking down barriers…
Yeah, I think the internet plays a massive part, the fact that people can share so much music now and host youtube videos, twitter, there’s a lot of conversation, it’s just a cool time to be in the industry.

That’s some nice optimism, I’m not used to it.

[Laughs]

I was going to ask you about your label, when did it start?

It started in 2008, well the idea started in about 2007 and then the first release was 2008 which was my release and then in 2009 I signed and released a record by Nat Birchall who’s a saxophone player I’ve been working with…

And you’ve collaborated with him…

Yeah, we’ve practically worked on each other’s albums consistently since then, and also I’ve just signed a trio called Go Go Penguin and they’re kind of like Soil & Pimp sessions, EST, and a bit of Aphex Twin in there, the drummer’s really super modern…again they kind of have this mad, melting pot of classical influences, electronica influences and jazz influences all just mashed into a new sound so yeah, that’s really exciting to be putting that record out.

What was the main drive behind the label, was it the kind of example of Mr Scruff and Gilles Peterson; their eclecticism…?
It was a combination of that and the fact that in Manchester there were so many good musicians around that I wanted to record and write music for and I didn’t quite know how at the time how else to put that music out or without having to compromise so I decided to do it. My brother’s a graphic designer and I’ve always had my own little businesses since when I was a kind, so I thought why not have a go at running a record label and it’s not a huge label but every year it’s tripling in sales. We’ve never lost any money, we’ve made enough money to make a really great follow up in each case so we’ve made profit margins to then go and spend more money in the studio and more money on session musicians so it’s been really positive from the start really.

Yeah, it seems to be a vibrant time, everyone setting up labels…
Yeah, I think the whole way the industry works now, everything’s really so well-structured that anyone could set up a label, I mean my distribution company have a portal online that you literally load all the tracks and the artwork and the detail about the release into that. You don’t need to even speak to anyone anymore, just load it all into this system and they send it off to worldwide distribution digitally and then physically you just get the cd’s sent to the factory office space and they just ship it out all over the world so it’s a very exciting and interesting time, in terms of the way it’s all set up, it’s so easy now for independents, with sites like Bandcamp, it’s amazing. I use Bandcamp now on my own personal website, as you can sell all the different formats really easily. And that side of the site’s been very successful, so it’s definitely a time for independents…they’ve got the upper hand in that sense…

So there’s more accommodation for the independents and their autonomy (in that respect)…
Yeah.

Well, that’s refreshingly encouraging.
It also means there’s going to be a hell of a lot more music to sift through which sometimes means there’s a lot less quality music out there but you know there’s also a chance for people who wouldn’t have got a chance otherwise that are talented. You know, I think in general people know when something’s good and it gets that energy.

Yeah, (in regards to the too much music claim) I think it was Matthew Herbert (again) who said, I’m not sure when/where he said it but he said something about the fact that we release too much music and we should just stop and listen to the music we already have…
In some ways I completely agree but in other ways this is our time, we should be sharing our feelings and thoughts through music and art and any format, through writing in another way, as much as I love Herbert I disagree, you know, that stuff was then so maybe we should not listen to anything before, it could be just every year, just listen to what comes out in that year.

Yeah, it can be overwhelming. Anyway, I noticed that you worked with Nitin Sawhney, what was that like?

Oh yeah, I've worked with him…three times actually on a project called After Shock where they bring musicians from all over the world together to write music over ten days and do a performance which is a little bit weird in itself but it's a good opportunity to try out new stuff and to get knowledge from someone like Nitin Sawhney, I've talked to him about the industry and about how he's gone about things, and even just talked about composition stuff, and he's a really nice guy. And he's very, very switched on, musically (as well as being) business-minded, so he's really interesting to be around. But yeah the project was quite crazy cause you'd have maybe five Italian musicians, five French musicians and five English musicians, and not neccessarily in the instrumentation you'd ideally like so maybe there wouldn't be a specific drummer or bass player or pianist so it was quite challenging. There seemed to be quite a lot of vocalists and electronic music producers but again it was that combination that we keep coming back to…all these different cultures and genres of music coming together and making something new…and it was really interesting.

What came out at the end of the ten days?

Well we had ten tracks that we had to perform, that we'd written over those days and it was to a sold out audiences in the UK, and in Italy. He's done the project for about ten years now I think, it's just really interesting…

Yeah I like the idea of set limitations…

Yeah, it was really good, the last one I got to work with a guy called Arun Ghosh who's a great clarinet player and two great bass players, Clive Hunt and a guy called Nick Blacker from Manchester and Nitin played on some of my tracks, we did some tracks of mine that had been written over the course of the ten days, and it was really nice…you get to play with one of the best and.biggest producers around. So yeah, it was great.

And you've said you came down to London for a live show on Saturday…

Yeah, I was playing at the Scala…

Oh yeah, think I saw the line-up….

Yeah, Debruit was really good and Jazzanova were standard-ly good and yeah it was a really nice night. I had played in Dublin the night before so I flew from Dublin to London and then back to Manchester. Dublin was brilliant aswell…first time in Ireland, and I love the Irish, my girlfriend's Irish so it was lovely to go over there and everyone was really, really positive.

And playing live, how do you like to translate the music from the record to that setting?

Well I still do quite a lot of the bigger gigs with the full band with 6 or 7 musicians but logistics in terms of touring to get a harp, a double bass, have an acoustic piano, drums, saxophone, trumpet, flute and string quartets…in some performances, it's very, very difficult to tour it and it costs more than we'd ever make back in a lot of ways so…well, I had a tour where I was supporting Portico Quartet, I got booked to support them on a number of dates in the UK and one of the restrictions was I had to do it with a trio cause there wasn't enough room on stage so I set up a trio which is drums, and a piano player plays a vintage Moog as the bass with his left hand, like a big subby, kind of clubby bass and then he plays with his right hand either a Fender Rhodes or a Nord or some sort of keyboard so he doubles up as bass player and piano and the drummer does all the grooves, sort of rhythm stuff and I just play over the top of it and I realised it sounded better when I started adding delays and reverbs to my trumpet and looping things. It's kind of become, almost, this experimental trio, cause you know, to play an hour with a trio would normally be quite boring, it can get repetitive if you're using the same sounds so we wanted to get really quite experimental with how we build and change the sounds throughout the performance so the trio would be the one which would do I'd say sixty per cent of the gigs and then for gigs like, I've got one in January at Ronnie Scott's, that'll be the full band when it's a proper jazz venue then I'll go do the full band.

Yeah, so you get access to both worlds…

Yeah, I get the Scala and Forum venues and I do them with a trio, which works well for the promoters and me and then I get to do the nice, big jazz festivals and all the cosy jazz clubs with the full jazz band.

[Interlude where I try to locate my next question in my scattered notes before Matthew reminds me of the Forum show]

Yeah, the Forum show, the Soundcrash show that's happening on the 23rd of November and it's Jazzanova, Seun Kuti and myself. It's sold out and I think it's going to be 2000 capacity, it's going to be a massive gig, I'm really excited about it, I mean I'm a massive Fela fan and I like a lot of Seun and Femi's stuff aswell so yeah can't wait…

Yeah, I haven't heard much of Fela's sons stuff…

Yeah, I think he's playing with the Africa 70 band so it'll be proper heavy afrobeat…..well it's either the Africa or the Egypt I'm not sure which one, I should do my homework on that one [laughs]

Yeah, I've heard the stuff Tony Allen did with Africa 70 which is just amazing. Anyway, after that gig what else have you got planned?

Well I've got a gig at an art gallery in Manchester with a quartet doing some stuff which I'm quite excited about and then the week after that I've got my main gig in Manchester, in my home city. I'm really looking forward to that and then I'm in Madrid the night after the one in Manchester so I can have a good party at my home gig but I've got a fly out to Madrid early the next morning and then I'm going to catch up with some of my old friends in Madrid.

Nice, and what have you got coming up for the label?

Well, I've got the Go Go Penguin release on the 19th of November and then I've got the next project that I'm doing which is a kind of deeper, more broad, spiritual jazz record following on from Fletcher Moss Park. It's got a Koto player on it, it might have some vocalists, I've been trying some stuff out with vocalists…

Koto, that's Japanese harp…

Yeah, it's a beautiful instrument. Yeah, it's also got flute, harp, double bass, drums, saxophone, trumpet, piano and it's going to have some more strings on some tracks and hopefully a vocalist but it's really a case of trying to find the right one. I've been working with quite a lot of different ones and it's just finding the one that fits that sound so that's coming out in hopefully, April or May and the trio that I'm working with, we've been in the studio writing some stuff around that kind of technology that we've been using on the gigs and that should come out next October sometime. And there's a couple of other projects that I'm trying to sign at the moment, well not trying, I'm in talks with so it shouldn't be long before I've confirmed other artists.

And the trio's work in the studio is reflecting that experimental kind of thing in the live setting?

Well, all I can really say is I'm heavily influenced by Aphex Twin and Squarepusher and all the stuff on Warp and the stuff I'm doing with the trio is kind of leaning towards more modern electronica and ambient kind of stuff so it's kind of in the same direction as maybe, Portico Quartet, where they're using drum machines and samplers and modern synthesizers on the new records. I love that, I think they're absolute genius' so I'm very influenced by that and I think what the label will do will just be to kind of slowly stretch out in terms of genres and things will start to meld together, all kinds of different sounds and genres….so yeah, that's the plan…[laughs]…

Sounds like a good plan.

He was also kind enough to drop an exclusive mix on us, a beautiful meld of hip hop, funk and textural electronica. Check it:

Go Go Penguin's latest release is out now, on Matthew's label, Gondwana Records. Available here.

Tim Wilson