The release of my EP A Watch of Nightingales in June 2020 was the culmination of a series of events and plans and ideas that had started eight years previously, a musical journey that took me in new directions and encouraged me to push my own creative boundaries. The genesis of The Hillside Project has already been discussed in a previous blog post but this is the music that started all of this, these were the pieces that were always at the back (or the front) of my mind.
Back in 2012 I made a piece called Zephyrus - a simple thing for piano which I then embellished with drums and acoustic bass and some glassy synth tones (as well as a recording of wind which ended up giving the piece its name: Zephyrus, the Greek god of the west wind). Sometime later I wrote another piece, again for piano, drums and acoustic bass, which became Niagara By Barrel (the title has no other significance than I’d recently read a fascinating article about Annie Edson Taylor who was the first person to survive plunging over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1901 - the fast and fluid nature of the music seemed to lend itself quite well to this extraordinary scenario).
Later again, I made the link between these two pieces - similar instrumentation; loosely sitting within the genre of ‘contemporary jazz’; and I already felt they deserved more… better recordings using real acoustic instruments, more care in their performance and assembly, a wider audience. The idea of an EP of four pieces for jazz trio, three instrumentals and one song, beautifully recorded, leapt fully-formed into my mind - I even already knew that it would be called A Watch of Nightingales (I was currently fascinated by the poetically obscure collective nouns for groups of animals and birds). I set about the task of completing this music, not knowing that it would still be many years before it saw the light of day…
Recording piano and drums for Zephyrus and Niagara By Barrel came first - one intense day in the studio with my brilliant engineer friend, Grant, recording a beautiful Steinway Model C and drum kit, me attempting to remember and play music that had come much earlier, assembling good takes and passable performances into recordings that I was happy with.
The other pieces took much much longer. Lyrics for the title track slowly formed in my mind and on paper (I’m not a natural lyricist, I discovered…!) and then slowly found their musical counterpart - chords and melodies eventually appearing and working together with the words. A Watch of Nightingales is about many things - loss and hope, impermanence and the concept of ‘home’, immortality through memory and finding peace.
The final piece (in the end, the first on the EP: Ravenglass) was the most elusive. I needed to find something that would bind the whole endeavour together, provide a striking beginning and an emotional and dynamic balance. Eventually this piece finally emerged in one flow-state morning, bold and graceful, and directly quoting the piano solo from the final track to provide the musical symmetry that I find so appealing.
The journey was still far from over. More piano and drum recording, an adventure in Toronto recording vocals for the title track, last-minute changes and rewrites and transpositions, replacing the Zephyrus synth part with real tuned wine glasses... Grant mixed the four finished tracks and then Simon Heyworth mastered the EP. Cathy Tillmann provided the beautiful cover photograph (which, again, required a logistical conundrum, tracking down the only known print of the photo on a remote island in British Columbia with a ferry ride needed to scan and send it across the world). Even the cover text proved problematic, a last-minute typo discovered, leading to frantic pleas to the publisher for a last-minute replacement before it hit streaming sites…
The whole project became all-encompassing and all-enveloping for so long. But my vision and hopes for it were always clear and I always knew what I needed to do next to polish and complete and finish the EP. My endless to-do list eventually dwindled to zero, all the disparate elements came together in a form that I was finally completely happy with. I experienced such generosity from so many people who gave up their time and expertise and encouragement to help me. I had my first ever launch party for the EP, a wonderfully hectic and hysterically chaotic Zoom call (due to the ongoing pandemic lockdown) with family and friends where I talked and shared the music and the stories of its creation. It was the perfect culmination of the long journey I’d set out on - I’d poured my heart and soul into making this music the best I possibly could and here was everyone, filling my heart and swelling my soul with their support and love.
I feel so strongly that this was the best I could do at the time. There will be more music of course, other pieces that I will be as pleased with, if not more so - but this music says everything I wanted to say in exactly the way I wanted to say it. And that is something to feel proud of…
Josh
