Interview,
Trish Clowes on 'A View With a Room'
British saxophonist and composer Trish Clowes is starting to become something of a familiar face in the Presto Music jazz camp, having spoken with us only last year about her favourite Wayne Shorter recording, and back in 2019 her excellent album Ninety Degrees Gravity was a Recording of the Week. Now with her sixth studio album A View With a Room due out soon on Greenleaf Music, as well as a UK tour planned for Spring 2022, it’s been good to properly sit down with Trish to chat about her musical upbringing, the process of writing her new album, and the collaborators she’s brought on for the project.
Trish comes from a musical family, with many of her older relatives being musicians themselves, though she’s quick to add that making a living off of it doesn’t really run in the family; “my parents are both really musical and still play music, they’re not professional musicians, but they are still very into it nonetheless. My maternal grandfather lived with us for some time – he’s a self-taught pianist – and I’d often sing with him, so performing music became a big part of my childhood.” Trish grew up in Shropshire, not exactly a hotbed for modern jazz music, but she maintained her interest in playing; “I wasn’t pushed very hard, I started learning the piano at age four and swapped to clarinet lessons when I was ten – we had an old clarinet knocking around from an aunt who’d done it at school. I did the odd grade exam here and there but it was nothing serious, I just thought of it as a hobby.”
It wasn’t until her teenage years that she started to lay the groundwork for her later career, whether or not she realised it; “At some point – I think I was about thirteen or so – I went to see my dad play in a local big-band. I remember hearing the tenor saxophone there and immediately thinking it was so cool, and ended up picking it up right away. I got quite bored with the clarinet very quickly after that!” she chuckles. “I started piano lessons again as a teenager and was always into writing my own little tunes, just very casually, but when I was doing my A-levels there was a point where I suddenly realised that everything in my life revolved around music, and that’s what I wanted to do with my life.” Trish was originally planning to study medicine, and aside from a brief phase of considering audio engineering as a career path, writing and playing music was nothing more than a hobby for her, in part, she says, due to where she grew up; “Shropshire’s a brilliant place to grow up, and having lived in London for so long now I really treasure not having been ‘trained up’ for music, rather… I found my own way into it. But it’s not like London where there are lots of things going on, there are no big cities in Shropshire besides Birmingham that’s kind of nearby.”
Trish moved to London to study jazz music at the Royal Academy immediately after a gap year following her A-levels, and has lived there ever since. She’s enjoyed a steady stream of music releases and now leads her own band MY IRIS, who play on her latest recording A View With a Room, her sixth studio album. MY IRIS features guitarist Chris Montague and drummer James Maddren, two players she met during her time studying in London, as well as Ross Stanley who was also enrolled at Guildhall School of Music at the time. After working with the three in various formations for some time, it wasn’t until the quartet fell into place that MY IRIS was formed; “Chris and James both played on my previous albums anyway, and Ross, Chris and I had been playing in a separate trio together as a little side project before we eventually just added James in to make the quartet. It wasn’t a conscious decision to have no bass in the band, but it just sort of happened and was a really good way of shaking up my writing – I had to put more thought into what role each instrument played in filling out the space.”
Trish takes inspiration from many sources on A View With a Room, but I wanted to ask her first about the three women she cites as inspiring certain tunes on the album; “That was a bit of a coincidence really, I didn’t plan it originally… although I was joking to someone the other day that I’ve got quite a few tunes already dedicated to (or named after) guys, so I should probably write some music about women! It wasn’t until I was writing the liner notes that I realised. ‘Amber’ was the only tune written before the pandemic; it’s for Amber Bauer, the CEO of Donate4Refugees, a charity I’ve been an ambassador for for a number of years. ‘Ayana’ isn’t named after someone I know personally, but Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who is an American marine biologist who’s done a lot of campaigning and research on climate change. I thought about both of those issues a lot during the pandemic, particularly as we began to notice that when humans stopped doing their thing, the Earth started to feel better for it!” ‘The Ness’ is a re-interpretation of ‘Round By the Ness’, a piece for solo cello that Trish wrote for her close friend and musical collaborator Louise McMonagle as a response to imagery by another collaborator, filmmaker Rose Hendry; “Rose directed the music video for ‘Abbott & Costello’ from my previous record, and was with her mother in Scotland during the first lockdown. She’d send me really beautiful videos and photos of the coastline she was living near, and it happened to coincide with me already wanting to write this solo cello piece, so that’s what ended up inspiring the music.”
Trish’s approach to songwriting is to trust in the process. With five other studio albums, one live album, and her upcoming seventh overall release already under her belt, she’s got that process down to a T; “it’s all about knowing what works, but also being willing to experiment and not letting yourself do the same thing every time. I try to write things from different perspectives and starting points. When you have more experience writing music it’s easier to just let things evolve, and not worry about where it’s leading to so much – just to see what it becomes,” she says, “Normally when I’m writing an album there’s always a couple of tunes that don’t make the cut, but the eight tracks we put together in soundchecks and livestreams just sort of worked out. Maybe it’s luck, maybe it’s experience!” Like many musicians, the isolation in the pandemic found its way into Trish’s writing, too; “A View With a Room alludes to a few things, of course ‘A Room With a View’ by E. M. Forster being the main cultural reference, but also people being stuck indoors. It’s quite difficult being stuck in your head a lot as part of your job, but during the pandemic I found I was quite well-practised at taking myself out of where I was, so it’s also a kind of play on imagination… it can mean whatever you want it to mean!”
Trish is keeping herself busy for the rest of the year, with numerous appearances and commissioned works in her calendar; “We’ve got a big tour this Spring – twenty-two gigs throughout April and May, so I’m quite excited about that. Things are still pretty precarious given the last couple of years but it feels like people are really up for getting things going again,” she continues, “I’ve got some duo things coming up, with Ross (gigs, and an album waiting to be released), and also Louise (we’re recording something soon, too), and I’ve got a piece which is nothing to do with the band or tour that’s being premiered with Orchestra of the Swan – I’ve guested with them a lot recently, so they’ve made me an associate artist and commissioned me to write this piece as part of that – which will have its first appearance just in the middle of this tour we’re doing.” It hasn’t taken much for Trish and co. to blow the cobwebs away and get back to touring the new material for A View With a Room, and you can catch her on tour with MY IRIS throughout April and May – click here to see Trish’s upcoming tour dates.
View With a Room releases on April 22nd via Greenleaf Music
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