Bill Laurance Solo
JazzAmbient Jazz
Bill Laurance – Pictures in your head
Bill Laurance has already tried out a few things. He has worked with Morcheeba and was in the studio with David Crosby. His friendship with Michael League was one of the starting points for the founding of the jazz collective Snarky Puppy, with whom he has been travelling the world for two decades. He is a classically trained pianist and composer, works as a producer, composes for big bands and orchestras, has various bands of his own and currently also enjoys travelling as a solo artist.
He draws inspiration from a variety of sources, from his colleagues, from old people and, above all, from young people: «I want to tell stories. I have a four-and-a-half-year-old son and his imagination always blows me away. He's at an age where anything is still possible. Being reminded of the power that imagination can unleash inspires me enormously. It influences me, and my job as an artist is to take people to another world through music. With my last concept album «Cables», I tried to do that through a lot of post-production and thinking about the immense growth of technology: a dark record, but always with the element of hope.»
Since then, five years and many unusual events have passed, including a pandemic that no longer made dystopian technoid scenarios seem unreal. But there have also been optimistic projects, Snarky Puppy's continued rise to fame, albums such as the duo «Where You Wish You Were» with Michael League, as well as initial projects with the young string ensemble The Untold Orchestra from Manchester. The ensemble took part in an arrangement of ‘Cables’, and Laurance in turn joined several concerts as a soloist. Eventually, a budget was found that made a joint record possible. When the project became a reality, Laurance realised how comfortable he felt with this combination: «I'm classically trained, I even have a degree in classical composition. And I always had the feeling that one of my roots was in this world. It is therefore a kind of return. It was also a conscious decision for me to work without a rhythm section. You suddenly have a lot more space without a cymbal. When I write a new programme, I want to go a different way. This time, the question of how I could use a string section as a rhythm section opened many floodgates for me. In the end, I ended up doing a lot more melodic stuff on the piano and the orchestra took care of the heavy stuff.»
This is an understatement, because the flowing lightness of the grand piano is also a high art of touch culture and creative nobility. The music of «Bloom» also develops its tension precisely from the dialogue between piano and orchestra, from reversed roles that assign the groove to the strings and the lines to the soloist, alternating and not always predictable in their development: «This time I imagine myself turning the pages of a children's book in every scene of the music. You are taken by the hand and led through the landscapes. I thought a lot about organic things, about nature and wilderness, about turbulent weather, wide vistas. I like hiking, and such impressions shape me when I compose. A melody is always part of it, as is clarity. If it becomes too abstract, then I feel lost. I love the idea of dreaming. That's also what my album is about: the ability to dream.» Bill Laurance composed and arranged these fantasies and motif wanderings. Joshua Poole helped him to turn them into scores, which the Untold Orchestra, conducted by Rory Storm, then realised with impressive vitality in September 2022. It is a new path for Bill Laurance, suspended between the worlds of experience of classical music, improvisation and imagination. And it sounds as if he could stay there for a while. «My job as an artist is to take people into another world with music.»
Ralf Dombrowski, jazzthing
The article appeared in the June-August issue of «jazzthing». More information and subscriptions at jazzthing.