Roulette Quartet
The Roulette Quartet started in 2022 as a series of live experiments around the idea of a jazz quartet and the impact on improvisation when musicians are faced to react to other disciplines like painting, dance and poetry.
It’s main objective is to challenge the musicians into improvising more by taking away the possibility of falling into the usual formulas such as head-solos-head. The first way this was done was by destabilising the hierarchies of the typical jazz quartet formation: lead (singer, brass, reed…), chords (guitar, piano, vibraphone…), bass and drums; the instrumentations for the quartets were carefully chosen to deviate from this formula either by choosing unusual instruments to impersonate those roles (violoncello instead of guitar, congas instead of drum kit) or by having multiple instruments from the same role rather than one from each, therefore forcing the player to impersonate an unusual role (two basses and two chord instruments; three wind instruments and a bass).
I am taking this as an opportunity to perform with a big variety of musicians from the Liverpool scene.
#6 AIAI Orchestra
Caroline Bordignon - Artist
Oliver Bullock - Organ
Ruby Donnelly - Vocals
Imogen Garnett - Harp
Ross McDonnell - Trombone
Nick Braton - Bass Clarinet
Alex McDowall - Guitar
Johnny Hunter - Drums
Pablo Sonnaillon - Double Bass
#5 Sliding Brushstrokes
Laura Sullivan - Artist
Ishmael Aasgaard - Trombone
Matthew Phillips - Cello
Dan Barreto - Double Bass
Pablo Sonnaillon - Double Bass
#4 a night of poetry
Luke Ledger - Sax
Alex McDowall - Guitar
Johnny Hunter - Drums
Pablo Sonnaillon - Double Bass
#3 Odds: 3-1
Martin Smith - Trumpet
Bob Whittaker - Tenor Sax
Nick Branton - Bass Clarinet
Pablo Sonnaillon - Double Bass
#2 Double or nothing
Alex McDowall - Guitar
Max O’Hara - Piano
Hugo Harrison - Double Bass
Pablo Sonnaillon - Double Bass
This first experiment combined different levels of familiarity with the other players.
#1
Luke Ledger - Sax
Matthew Phillips - Cello
Chris Preston - Congas
Pablo Sonnaillon - Double Bass
Having congas and cello opened a lot of space in the music, as the cello has a very limited chordal power other than arpeggiating and the congas offer a much more reduced colour palette than a full drum kit, mainly because of the lack of metallic and sustained sounds.
The congas are strongly associated with latin American and African grooves, but they don’t usually work so well for swing so we transformed the swing grooves into afrocuban compound time grooves such as bembe, this way the swing tunes in 4/4 and 3/4 became 12/8 and 9/8 in afrocuban.
On the other side of the rhythmic spectrum we got the bowed cello; every time Matt used it for a solo it transported us into a very different sound world
This juxtaposition allowed for and pushed us into an array of highly fluid musical textures. Luke’s sax improvisation skilfully travelled between this contrasting mysterious moods like a cat in the night.
I have played a lot in the last five years with Luke in a couple of fusion Jazz bands (Jam Scones, Jazz Cabbage) but those always involved a very busy rhythm section (guitar, piano, drums and bass. I played in a 6 piece latin music band with Chris called Toca Tucán for a couple of years but that band involved a much smaller degree of improvisation as the music, at least in comparison, was heavily arranged. With Matt I had only had the occasional jam at the Sunday night latin jazz in The Grapes, and for that he was playing drum kit, not cello!