Interview, Tenderlonious on keeping busy and international collaborations

London-based multi-instrumentalist, record producer and 22a label boss Ed Cawthorne - known by his alias ‘Tenderlonious’ - is one of the hardest-working musicians out there today. Founding 22a as a passion project after a year on the grind as the saxophonist for a touring pop artist, Cawthorne has been putting out records either solo or collaboratively since the mid-2010s, with recent works including collaborations with Pakistani instrumental quartet Jaubi, trumpeter Nick Walters and a tribute to ‘70s Italian film music with Lorenzo Morresi. Calling us from his home studio surrounded by vintage analog synthesisers on one side and Debussy sheet music on the other, ‘Tender’ kindly took the time out of his busy schedule to sit down with me last week to chat about his origins in music as a beatmaker, the formation of 22a and the many plans he’s got for the next 12 months.

You started out as more of a producer/beatmaker before starting 22a and playing the saxophone. Could you talk a little about your early work, and what made you change course?

I started out as a DJ when I was around 14 years old, and started to get interested in making my own tunes when I’d just turned 16; that seemed like the natural progression from DJing. I mostly work with hardware synthesisers and drum machines now, but at the time I had a computer with Cubasis (which later became Cubase). When I first started I didn’t know anyone else who did it and I didn’t really know how you did it, so I just started messing around and sending demos out to labels I admired. Some of these people got back to me and started giving me advice on how to produce; some people like this producer called Equinox I’m still close friends with, he in particular really took me under his wing. I learned a lot from other producers, but I always felt quite limited - I was enjoying making music, but felt limited by my musical knowledge and relying on samples to make music. Of course there was a whole culture around crate digging that was really great, but for me there just came a point where I was frustrated that I didn’t quite understand the music I was sampling.

You started learning the saxophone first, correct?

Yeah, by the time I was 23 I’d started playing the saxophone. I’d always liked the sound of the sax - I loved using saxophone licks in my beats, it always made them feel more organic and ‘live’ - I’d nick solos from people like Yusef Lateef and John Klemmer. I used to go to work quite early in the morning and I’d always see what I thought was a ‘golden clarinet’ in the window of this little music shop in my hometown. One day I finally went in and asked the shopkeeper “what about that clarinet in the window?” and he said “well, first of all that’s a saxophone - and I wouldn’t recommend playing that because it’s a soprano, it’s more difficult”. But I still really wanted to play it, so I rented it and started having lessons with a local teacher, then went back after a month and bought it. That was the start of my journey - I took about 5 years off producing because I got so stuck into the saxophone, practicing crazy hours. At the time I was working as a runner at a TV studio so I’d go in early to use the vocal booths as practice rooms - I’d go for anywhere between 3 to 6 hours a day, even on weekends.

It sounds like the saxophone really became a way of life for you, then?

Yeah, I would hit up jam sessions in London too, and I eventually got this gig as a saxophone player for a pop singer. I’d bought myself a tenor by then, because the soprano wasn’t really suitable for the gig, despite people like Kenny G, Steve Lacy, Sidney Bechet and John Coltrane using them. The pop gig was busy and lucrative, and I liked it at first but it changed over the year I was doing it - some bigwig executive came in and started to cut back the band bit by bit, and the horns were going to be the first to go, which wasn’t great, because I’d just quit my job to do this gig!

I said to Nick Walters (the trumpet player from Ruby Rushton) that we’re gonna have to “walk the bar” - something jazz and blues players would do in the 50s, literally walking on the bar while they played to show off - so that every journalist writing about the tour would know about the horn section. We’d do these little routines on stage together - they ended up keeping us on the tour and even made me musical director afterwards, so it worked out in the end, but it was a little corny. I quickly realised however that I didn’t really enjoy the pop game, and decided to leave after a year. That’s when I started my band Ruby Rushton and set up 22a; I wanted to work on something more musically fulfilling.

Ruby Rushton’s first album wasn’t the first release on the label though, was it?

I wrote the first Ruby Rushton album, Two For Joy, while we were on tour and recorded it at the end of 2011. I was happy with it but was nervous to give it to another label, so it really was the impetus for me starting 22a. The UK jazz scene wasn’t what it is today back then - I realised it would be risky to start a label and have the first release be a jazz album, so the first handful of 22a releases were these electronic sampler 12-inches with a different artist on each side. Those first releases got the label on the map, and people took interest quite quickly - we’d only do 100 hand-stamped record editions of each, no digital originally, and that really created a buzz around the label. Dummy Mag had the first big feature on the label, we did an interview with The Wire, and we had a bit of radio hype too. It was only after we built up that hype that we decided to release Two For Joy. It’s quite difficult to maintain that interest, though.

You can make a big splash, but I suppose then it’s a case of what to do next…

We really did make a big splash, and a lot of the artists on the label took it in different ways - eventually folks moved off in their own directions, and I decided to just focus on my own interests. I’ve got enough things going on and I’m collaborating with enough people to keep the label interesting, so now 22a is just an outlet for my music, or music I’m otherwise involved with. I’m a creative person before I’m a businessman, so this is what comes more naturally to me. I’ve always been about taking risks, discovering stuff, travelling around… maybe that’s why I’ve got folks I’m working with in Poland, Pakistan, Italy and so on.

Photo credit: Michael Wilkin

You mentioned Pakistan - I wanted to ask you about the quartet out there you’ve worked with recently, Jaubi. How did that first visit out to Lahore happen?

I already had an interest in that part of the world - my dad spent a lot of time in the Middle-East, India and the Far East during the 60s and the 70s. All these travels influenced the decoration around my house, stuff he’d collected in his time out there. Later in life when I picked up the flute I got very into Indian flautists who played the bansuri - the Indian bamboo flute - so it became a dream of mine to go out and work with some traditional musicians. I was set on going to India when one of these Polish musicians I was working with - from the band EABS - overheard and suggested we visit Jaubi in Pakistan, who they knew from collaborating in the past. They’d helped release a remix Jaubi had done of Nas’s ‘New York State of Mind’ called ‘Lahore State of Mind’, kind of an East-meets-West fusion thing, so we went out there with Marek from EABS.

It was funny, I wanted to work with them on some very traditional spiritual ragas, but they were more interested in Western music and wanted to do this kind of hip-hop-fusion thing. That’s why a few different releases came out of that visit - the 22a releases, Tender in Lahore and Ragas From Lahore had more traditional-sounding music, then another record came out on Astigmatic Records earlier this year called Nafs at Peace, which was more of that fusion stuff. I wasn’t sure how it’d be received at first, but the 22a stuff got some good coverage from folks like Giles Peterson and The Guardian, as did Nafs at Peace - both got Global Album of the Month, so people were obviously interested in this cross-cultural collaboration. I still want to go to India, though!

So India next, then where else?

I want to look into doing something in Turkey - I’ve got connections out in Istanbul, so that should be feasible - but for now I’ve got to finish a record out in Italy first with this producer called Lorenzo Moressi. We’re doing a record inspired by Italian film music from the 1970s - he used to work for a label that reissued that kind of stuff, so we wanted to do a tribute to that era of funky, complex yet humorous music.

I’ve got ambitions to do lots of different kinds of things, though - right now I’m really infatuated with the flute, and want to put out a more classical flute-focussed project at some point. I’ve been sporadically working on a sequel to On Flute which I’m yet to announce, so I think I'll mainly be working on the flute rather than the sax for the foreseeable future, but then I just put out TEK-88 which is real synth-based house music stuff. What kind of music I want to write really just depends on my mood.

You’ve got quite a busy year ahead of you then, anything else you’ve got planned?

Yeah, I’d quite like to put out another Ruby Rushton record, but I don’t just want to make another jazz fusion record, you know? Hopefully we’ll get back into the studio next year. Between that and my record with Lorenzo that’ll be good, and I always put out a bunch of stuff in between - that’s been harder recently though as vinyl production has slowed down a lot. You have to plan ahead a little more - which isn’t really how I work! I don’t like doing social media either - I prefer to just keep putting out music - but that’s more of a challenge nowadays.

I’m very lucky though; I’ve got quite a committed following from the last 8 years or so of 22a, it’s not loads of people but it’s enough, and I hope it’ll grow in the long-term over the next few decades. It’s hard to stay relevant while maintaining integrity in this industry, but we’ll see how things go.

Check out some of our favourite 22a and Tenderlonious releases below...