Saxophonist Phil Bancroft releases the first album by his Standards Trio, No Need For Silence, on his Myriad Streams platform on Friday 24th October.
A celebration of music from the Black American jazz tradition, the album reflects the inspiration Bancroft felt setting out as a teenaged musician on hearing his primary influences, saxophonists John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman and Wayne Shorter.
Here were players who communicated with an overwhelming beauty and intoxicating power. More than this, however, they had a uniqueness of expression. It wasn’t just saxophonists who moved the young Bancroft. Pianists Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, bassists Charles Mingus and Jimmy Garrison and vocalists Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, as well as characters who shaped jazz from Louis Armstrong through Charlie Parker and on to David Murray and beyond, drove Bancroft’s desire also to find his own voice.
“As a white European from a privileged background, I had no idea of the life experiences that fed into those who nurtured and sustained the Black American jazz tradition,” says Bancroft. “I listened to these musicians with a sense of awe but I also took inspiration from European jazz, Celtic music, Indian classical music, African traditions, Western classical music and a host of other sources across musicology, science, philosophy and literature.”
For years, although he continued to listen to it, Bancroft studiously avoided playing the repertoire that had triggered his interest in jazz, preferring to concentrate on music shaped by his own experience. Then, a few years ago, he felt ready. Gathering together long-time partners, bassist Mario Caribe and twin brother, Tom Bancroft, he formed a trio he felt both comfortable with and suitably challenged by.
“It seemed that the time was right to start playing gigs where we celebrated this music,” he says. “It’s not just about the melodies and chord changes. It is about rhythm, it is about feel, about technical and spiritual aspects of improvisation. It’s also about honesty and creating form and meaning in the moment.”
The performances on this album aren’t built from a process of imitation or simulation, Bancroft stresses. As a group the trio are trying to honour the process of finding one’s voice, of being a true improviser, allowing meaning to emerge in music that is within a tradition, but which is fresh, vital and authentic.
“Others will decide if we have succeeded in this,” he says.