Trish Clowes & Ross Stanley: Journey to Where

After four albums together in saxophonist Trish Clowes' quartet My Iris, Clowes and pianist Ross Stanley peel away from the quartet for this intimate duo outing, recorded in Wigmore Hall, London in July 2021. A studio album by design, there is, nevertheless, an unguarded, searching quality to these exchanges which is more in keeping with the energy of a live performance. Blurring the lines between improvisation and composition, this intuitive duo artfully muddies the waters of jazz and classical, traditional and contemporary vocabulary.

Four originals sit alongside interpretations of works by composers close to the duo's hearts. This album marks Stanley's bow as a composer; his "Ashford Days" pays handsome tribute to John Taylor (one of the UK's most celebrated jazz musicians), with Clowes' and Stanley's fluid exchanges evoking something of the chamber-jazz quality of Taylor's celebrated Azimuth. The pianist's "Avoidance" flows from a similar source, skipping along with folksy elan, as first Stanley and then Clowes stretch out. The chamber-jazz etiquette, however, does not fit the entire program so snugly. Just one full spin of the disc reveals the surprising breadth of the musical panorama.

One can almost imagine a fast-walking bass and chittering ride cymbal on Clowes' "Decently Ripped," whose fleet unison lines and melodic free-flowing solos harken back to bebop's heyday. Cuba is the port of call for a lilting rendition of Osvaldo Farrés' "Tres Palabras," the duo following assuredly in the footsteps of Nat King Cole, Chico O'Farrill, Kenny Burrell, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Stewart, Joe Henderson and Brad Mehldau amongst a host of starry interpreters of this beautiful melody. And where one might also reasonably expect a similarly faithful reading of Duke Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss," the duo instead delivers a wonderfully minimalist, melodically fractured reimagining, with Clowes' breathy lyricism evoking Wayne Shorter at his most introspective and enigmatic.

A former organ scholar at Marlborough College, Stanley pays his dues to the organists' union with Marcel Dupré's "Trois Preludes et Fugues, Op. 7 No. 3, Prelude in G Minor" and Hubert Howell's "Gloucester Service." On the former, with its urgent undercurrent, pianist and saxophonist sew back-to-back solos together, largely staying out of each other's way until the harmonically rich final part where they weave and bob in playful tandem. The latter, once beyond the hymnal intro, travels far from Howell's original canticle, with Stanley's and Clowes's billowing lines providing some of the album's most adventurous passages.

"Sarah" is Clowes' homage to vaccinologist Sarah Gilbert, and has the feel of an open-ended, improvised dialogue masked as composition... or perhaps the other way around; Regardless of the form, the brooding chemistry at play exerts an unrelenting grip. Closing out a fascinating set is the duo's bold deconstruction of "The Month of January," a traditional tune beloved in Ireland and the British Isles. Though not as hauntingly beautiful as, say, June Tabor's version, Stanley's and Clowes' reading is haunting in a different way; their journey from curiously abstract rumination to light-as-a-feather melodicism places this version of the much-covered song in a category of one. Much like the album as a whole.