Alison Rayner on SEMA4

With a career in jazz that spans from the 1980s to the present day, Alison Rayner has a well-deserved reputation for being a predominant figurehead in British jazz. Praised for her melodic bass playing, as well as her talent for composition, her skills have seen her play to audiences all over the world. Having toured and played extensively with the Latin-jazz group The Guest Stars during the 80s, Alison Rayner has gone on to build an extensive career that has in most recent years seen her forming her own quintet ensemble. A few weeks ago I was fortunate to have Alison join me to discuss the ensemble's fourth release, SEMA4, and her ever-growing musical career.

SEMA4 is a series of live recordings from your concert at London’s Vortex. What prompted you to release these recordings as an album? 

When I was planning a new album in late 2023, we had some great new material which we had started to play live. I thought a live recording would give us a chance to see how it worked and get some audience feedback. If it went well, I thought we might end up with one or two tracks to put towards the album before going into the studio to record the rest. I had a pretty open mind. As soon as I started listening to the rough mixes, I thought ‘we’ve got an album here’. There was great playing, lovely solos – the whole thing just sounded live and exciting. The atmosphere of the live audience made all the difference. I love studio recording, but you focus more on getting the perfect sound on each instrument and it's harder to get a live vibe there without an audience – there's an energy there, not just between you as an ensemble, but also between you and the audience when you play live. And we had that.

The tune/album title “Semaphore” is an interesting one - why is it significant?

There was a lot of serendipity with this whole process, including ending up with a whole album’s worth of recordings, which I didn't imagine at the beginning. This tune (now called Semaphore) didn’t initially have a title, but as the time signature was 7/4, I just referred to it as that. In rehearsal, I said ‘let’s do 7/4 now’ and Buster (our drummer) misheard me and said ‘Semaphore? Which one is that?’ The misunderstanding was a funny moment, but then I realised that ‘semaphore’ is a type of non-verbal communication, something we do constantly as musicians. It's jazz: we're improvising, things change all the time. We're constantly looking, clocking each other, giving little signals, aural and visual – the music is full of that, especially in an odd meter. So it felt completely appropriate.

My wife, who does our album designs, was immediately thinking of the visuals. When she started working on the design she wrote ‘SEMA4’. There are five symbols there (S-E-M-A and the number 4), and there are five of us in the band. And then I realised that the number four is significant because it's our fourth album together. So it worked in many ways.

The rapport within the ensemble is undeniable when listening to the album. How does the dynamic between you all influence the way you develop new material?

This album is the most collaborative we've done in terms of the compositions. When I started the group in around 2012, we played just my pieces. I’d been writing music for other bands and recordings for very many years, but it was the first time I had led a group to play my own music. Deirdre, Diane and Steve are all great writers, so on the second album Diane and Steve contributed a piece each and it's become more collaborative since then. Lockdown was a difficult time for me, and by the time we got back to playing again I was having something almost like writer's block. I brought one or two ideas along to try and then the others also brought new pieces, so that was really encouraging. It was a very positive opening back into playing again and so SEMA4 as an album is very much about the group.

There are plenty of styles that weave through the album. Where have your musical influences come from? 

I've always been into all kinds of music so there are many influences. When I was young my parents listened to music of different kinds, including big bands, show songs and classical music. I absolutely loved Romantic music, like Mendelssohn and Sibelius, with beautiful melodies – melody is important for me. When I was a teenager, it was the 60s and that was a fantastic time for popular music. I loved 60s pop and rock and then I really got into soul, funk and disco in the 70s.

I started to play jazz probably in the late 70s, when I discovered bands like Weather Report, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny. And in the 80s there was a fantastic scene in London: African-inspired bands and Latin music, both Brazilian and Afro-Cuban. I was in a band called The Guest Stars in the 80s; we toured and played constantly, some swing and bebop but we'd also play Latin and African-inspired music. In the 90s I was in bands playing Balkan and Eastern-European music and also Greek fusion. That was a big learning curve for me, not having grown up with that music and those rhythms, to feel fives and sevens and nines. And it's so wonderful how you learn from other musicians. You hear other music, you meet new people, and they introduce you to new ideas. So my influences are eclectic.

As bassist and bandleader how do you balance providing the musical foundation as well as expressing your own melodic voice?

It's interesting because as a bass player I’m leading from the back. I have a theory that people play instruments that suit their character and playing bass is the perfect instrument for me. It suits me because I love the role of being between the harmony and the rhythm. It's a happy place; I have a feeling of being essential in holding everything together, but I also have a tremendous freedom by being a writer. I sometimes start a piece with a groove on the bass, but more often my pieces come to me when I'm not at an instrument or at a computer. I do a lot of walking, and my writing often comes from singing ideas as I walk. I have ideas for grooves, riffs, or melodies which I develop later at home. Writing is creative and important for me; I’m expressing my own voice through the piece – melody is a huge part of that. I do sometimes include a melody on the bass or a bass solo, but only if I feel it works within the music. 

Are there any tracks on the album that hold a special significance for you?

Well, I love the whole album, I'm really pleased with it all. I’ve known everybody in the band for a long time, we’re old friends, so the way they write and the things they've written about I can really connect with. But my own pieces of course feel especially significant because they come from within me. 

One of the tracks that holds significance for me is the first piece on the album, ‘Espíritu Libre’ which is essentially about freedom. Throughout the lockdowns I felt very trapped and realised how important it is to have freedom, be able to move around, meet people and see different places. When we were able to travel again, I went through France to the Basque Country, and driving through tunnels through the Pyrenees you emerge into extraordinary vistas of hills and valleys, surrounded by greenery – it feels so open and gives a wonderful sense of exploration and discovery of new places. The title means ‘free spirit’ in Basque.

Another piece for me that has personal significance is ‘All Will Be Well’. This is a phrase I used frequently over two years when things were looking very bad – and I was desperately hoping it would turn out okay. It’s about the tyranny of hope. There is poignancy there, the pain when things do not turn out as they should; it was a very difficult time for me. The piece rests on an emotional intensity with lots of improvisation, dynamics, peaks and drops. It’s a hard piece to get live so when we got it exactly as it should be in our live recording at the Vortex, it was amazing. It worked as I had hoped in one take, so we left it just as it was played.

Do you have plans to share this music with more audiences? 

We've been touring the album since the autumn; we played at Scarborough Jazz Festival, Cambridge and sold out at Ronnie Scott's, which was a great night. So far this year we have played Birmingham, Shrewsbury, Bristol and had our album launch at the Pizza Express in Dean Street on Sunday 9th March. We also did a session on ‘In Tune’ (BBC Radio 3) Friday 7th March, which was very nice indeed. We’re in Lincoln, Newcastle, Coventry and Brighton in the next few weeks, with plans for more touring in the autumn, including some South-West dates. So yes, we'll be sharing this music as much as we can. That's what we do!

Alison's new quintet album SEMA4 is now available with Blow The Fuse Records.