Matthew Halsall to conjure up great sounds at The Everyman for Cork Jazz Weekend 

“I would say that when I’m making an album the main thing for me is trying to capture a certain mood or atmosphere.”
Since the release of his debut album in 2008, British trumpeter, composer and band leader Matthew Halsall has made mood a hallmark of his work with each album feeling like a cohesive document. It transpires that there is a substantial reason for this. For a long while now, Halsall has approached the writing of each album with a specific conceptual framework, one that draws inspiration from his immediate environment.

This approach goes back to his fourth album, 2012’s Fletcher Moss Park, which was conceived in that very park in Manchester. That’s not to say he didn’t have clear ideas for his albums up to this point. The preceding album, On the Go, was inspired by the recordings of American players in Paris in the ’60s and was very tied into the cinema of the time, such as Herbie Hancock’s soundtrack to Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight and Miles Davis’ work on Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold.

“I was thinking of being in Paris in the ’60s, almost in a black and white cinema world,” reveals Halsall.

“But then Fletcher Moss Park was very much full colour and real life and absorbing everything around me and the sort of sense of freedom and freshness. It was all written in spring, as well, which is a nice, beautiful time of year to make music.”

Bringing headphones, a laptop and a little keyboard, Halsall would visit the park at dawn and would sit and compose for about three or four hours, “just after sunrise when the dawn chorus was happening. All the music on that album was composed in that park. And there’s a unique sound to that record that I don’t think I would have made anywhere else.”

His latest album, An Ever Changing View, as the title suggests, sees a continuation of that approach.

“I’m definitely trying to capture musically the things I’m seeing when I was composing,” he acknowledges.

“Because I was composing in specific locations with views of the sea and countryside and mountains and forests. And there was very specific ideas in my mind of what I wanted to achieve. Like this almost landscape painting through music, through audio and sound, when I made the new album. And I quite liked the idea of this sort of lifestyle of landscape painter where you set up somewhere beautiful and sit for hours and hours and just enjoy the scenery and try to capture it. Instead of a paintbrush, for me it was microphones and various instruments to capture that.”

He adds: “I really like composing in different locations. I find I make music in a very different way where you can put me in ten different places and I’ll come up with different types of music because I react to the space and the scenery around me a lot when I’m composing.”

His previous album, 2020’s Salute to the Sun, proved he didn’t necessarily need a view before him. He could travel in his imagination online.

“I was listening to field recordings of tropical rainforests and jungles on YouTube whilst composing in Manchester,” he shares. “It was quite entertaining for me looking out the window and it was miserable grey skies and pouring down rain. But I would close my eyes and put my headphones on and I was suddenly transported to this sort of exotic tropical jungle space and then I started to think about how I could create music that was within that space rather than the space I was in in Manchester.

“I think there’s something in the idea that when you put headphones on and close your eyes music can take you to really magical places. I found that all the way through my life, listening to loads and loads of different albums I found that they really give me atmospheres and feelings.”

Actually incorporating field recordings into his music was something he avoided until now with An Ever Changing View. Accompanying the flurry of strings on the album prologue “Tracing Nature” is the sound of birdsong and running water. The gentle lapping of waves arrives at the end of “Mountains, Trees and Seas” and more bird song is featured on the interlude track “Field of Vision.” But the album also finds him giving himself a good shaking up.

“I just felt that this record was one I wanted to be the most playful it could possibly be and the most free and open as I could be, so on this new album I play a lot more instruments. On all my other albums I compose the music, but I don’t actually play anything other than the trumpet. On this new album, on some of the tracks, I play the piano. On some of them I play things like the celeste and glockinspiels. I play the kalimba. I play the flute, loads of percussions.

“It was a real journey of complete freedom and playfulness and not worrying about how we were going to play this music live or how difficult it was going to be to record over the top of some of the foundations that I had created. I just didn’t worry about anything. I just went on a journey and luckily everything went really smoothly on the journey. The band loved playing over the top of all the foundations I’d laid down. And it was really good fun.

Every child is an artist... it’s how you continue to be an artist as you grow older

“I this Picasso quote that had been very much sticking in my mind throughout the journey of this album, which is that ‘every child is an artist. It’s how you continue to be an artist as you grow older.’ And I wanted to find that sort of inner child that was an artist and had complete freedom and creativity. You know the older you get the more you think you know and the more restrictions you put in place when you’re making music.

“I was saying to someone the other day that when I put my hands on the piano, when I go to play piano, my hands almost automatically create shapes that I’ve learned over the course of my life and I wanted to use instruments and to think of making music completely from scratch again. So that’s why I used things like 17 note kalimba and things that basically I didn’t have a preconceived idea of how I was going to make the music.”

As ever, the results are stunning, producing a typical beautifully balanced, unshowy and meditative listen. Perhaps his trumpet playing feels a little more foregrounded on An Ever Changing View, despite playing so many other instruments on the record. Even so, it’s as remarkably restrained and measured as it is on his previous output. Matthew Halsall’s name may be on all his records, but it never feels like it’s just about him. His trumpet always sits tastefully among the other instruments.

“I grew up in the big band world and I’ve never been that fashy lead trumpet player that blasts out really high notes,” he insists.

“When I’m playing and practising trumpet, and I practise a lot and I really enjoy developing and growing and thinking, but even when I practise playing high I don’t particularly enjoy the end product.

“I’ve got a specific sweet spot within the trumpet and the way I use it that I think is the pitch I want to play at and I’m happy with and enjoy listening to.”

• Matthew Halsall plays the Everyman Theatre on Friday, October 27, at 10pm, and Saturday, October 28, at 2pm.