Travels and memories

I associate saxes with jazz rather than classical, but I was taken by the Andromeda Sax Quartet that played at Wesley.  I was recording and I had recorded them before and the theme of the concert, Mass transit, seemed pretty pedestrian (well, not on foot, but you get the idea) but it was anything but.  So we heard a string of cities imaged by composers in their youthful ramblings, Cordoba, Sarajevo, Koln and Addis Ababa from Guillermo Lago and Lisboa, Casablanca, Alger and Retour from Pedro Iturralde, and a view of the worlds from Irish composer Emma O'Halloran after a move to Miami, picturing the city of night life and ocean.  These are not particularly known composers showing the adventurousness of the Quartet and the rarity of the sax quartet format, probably/perhaps both.  The format is Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone saxes, so a neat choral-like structure and related somewhat to the much more common string quartet.  They added a piano for the second half of the show which included the concert's namesake, Mass transit.  This was originally written for string quartet and piano and arranged for this format: very successfully even if the piano was lost amongst some loud horns (excuse the jazz-ism).  This particularly interested me, given it was a memory of the composer's, Sam Wu's, memories of public transport in Shanghai, metro, gardens, train announcements and the rhythms of motion.  It was particularly interesting for me as we'd been in Shanghai just weeks before and travelled the 300kpm, 7min maglev trip to the airport which appears as mvt.3 Airport express.  So it was close to home but also loud and insistent and adventurous and wonderfully capable.  Chatting with the group afterwards, I heard of workshops and friendships with the masters of the classical sax world.  I guess this is a pretty small community and well known within its own world: something that strings or even woodwinds and the rest might not know.  Whatever, this was a fabulously interesting outing, loud, skilled, mature and responsive and open to all manner of new classical and related musics, from jazz-like grooves from bari and tenor through pretty 30's-like big bands to C20th classics.  Catch them if you can.

Andromeda Sax Quartet comprises Paige Gullifer (soprano), Ryan Piccione (alto), Henry Docker (tenor) and Sam Dong (baritone) and Catherine Li (piano) joined them for the second half of the performance.

Fresh ears

They are young and they play four saxes, like a string quartet only dirtier and noisier, and maybe that's why they are so challenging.  And they were.  I love baroque and the big names but it's refreshing to hear the minimalist textures  moving pitch or key, and the melody sharing between voices, soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and the varying roles at different times.  And sometimes the huge beauty of a long-held chord or the circular breathing (pretty sure I saw it from at least two players) or the crescendos ending sharply on high.  These were interesting composers, modern, mostly with music for sax quartet, although they did a few arrangements of traditional pieces that had been performed by the Danish String Quartet.  And these seemed to be personal relationships with the composers, Australian or otherwise, obtaining permissions and sampled backgrounds and presumably charts, too.  Not once otherwise have I heard electro-acoustic music on a classical stage.  This was samples of a baby, a Salvation Army band and was it the streets of NYC (?) that they played along to.  Lots of six feels, some fours, perhaps a 7, but maybe just the count challenge of polymeters.  They played composers I didn't know, Jabra Latham, Gemma Peacocke, Alex Turley, Jacob TV and a few traditional tunes, so not really something you know, but I would love to get to know this.  Fabulous fresh ears and sounds.

The Andromeda Saxophone Quartet performed at Wesley.  ASQ comprises Paige Gullifer (soprano sax), Ryan Piccione (alto sax), Henry Docker (tenor sax) and Sam Dong (baritone sax).