ANDREW MCCORMACK: SOLO (UBU0059)

My mission in music is constantly evolving. 

 I’m often experimenting with ways to communicate my ideas to the audience and solo piano is a very direct and explicit way to do that. 

 However, solo concerts are difficult to pull off well. There’s an exposed test of all your facility which can be risky and exhausting, plus it’s lonely up there.

 Despite this, you could say I’m addicted. Particularly the hush of the room when something special happens in the moment and everyone is locked in. 

 These are fleeting moments that are never guaranteed but when they arrive, feel timeless and we’re always left hungry for more after they’re gone.

 Music can have an amazing shortcut to the transcendent if we allow it and we might find ourselves in a transfixed state sharing a collective experience as one.

 The search for those moments is what often brings us back to music again and again.

 As I get older I seem to want to work harder than ever before on my music, as long as time and health will allow. 

 I’m aware of the need to continually update what I’m doing otherwise there is the danger of things ossifying and to me that’s artistic death! Music really is a lifelong quest and I never want to lose that fascination. 

 I’m interested in the idea of using the great traditions and masterful achievements of our culture but finding ways of pushing and keeping it alive in the present. I think this is the task of any modern-day artist. Communicating through a common language but with a freshness of ideas. This is also what I consider the great artists in history to have done, treading a path between the known and the unknown. 

 For example, you can carefully work on total evenness in your scales with absolute harmonic outline and use the techniques developed over hundreds of years. But when you’re in the moment, your fingers might just fly about doing all sorts of beautifully chaotic things and who knows what you might discover.

 It’s important to have these surprises even if you didn’t fully intend the results. There’s still beauty in these imperfections and Lord knows I have a few of my own on this recording. 

But letting go of that control is also more interesting somehow for the listener as allowing some vulnerability can make a bond between performer and audience if the goal is shared. 

 My study in composition has become something of a wing man to my playing. Guiding the improvisations with the aim of overall arc and logic although I do try to just ‘be in the moment’ too. 

 Nobody Else but Me and Thelonious Monk’s We See are quasi studies in two-part invention and the latter became like a rough line drawing. Monk is one of my favourite composers in the jazz repertoire because his signature sound is all over these tightly made compositions, even though you might substantially change them from the original. 

 In solo piano there’s a lot more room for the middle voices to speak.

 There is a concerted effort in places to get the left hand more involved melodically as opposed to the often default stabbing jazz-piano-left-hand-boxing-glove approach! 

 I Can’t Believe You’re in Love with Me is a light nod to the Stravinsky tarantella from Pulcinella, even though it sounds nothing like it! Also the coda of Nobody Else but Me has snatches of the Russian composer Petruschka too. 

 Although each piece generally has its own mood and character, in most places I have tried to add contrasting sections so that we go on a little bit of a journey. 

 Nomad was quite meticulously planned in this way, whereas Shaper Maker was one idea, then I set off to new harmonic pastures on the fly whilst keeping the melody in close proximity to hold the whole thing together. 

 I suppose a solo piano record from me might raise an eyebrow or two having just focused the last three years to a prog-rock math-jazz project? As I said earlier, my mission in music is constantly evolving and I might add, not necessarily in a straight line.

 Most of the solo album was recorded in 2016 but as things panned out, I released the first Graviton album instead. Fast forward to 2019, listening back I found I was really up to something in those sessions and that I should round it out with some updated takes in the summer. 

 The final results are a recital of solo piano music that uses composition as a springboard for improvised exploration with an overarching theme of storytelling devices such as contrast within the pieces themselves.

 These explorations went beyond my own compositions and on to other composers’ music as well.

 Moving forward I want to sharpen my playing and see what lies ahead, just beyond what I already know, understand and can do.