Sax stalwart Paul Booth is the curator of the Secret Sessions project, which is an outlet for new music that is created, played, and ultimately recorded by grouping like-minded artists and friends together. It works like this Paul carefully selects a range of highly talented musicians who turn up to the recording studio, only knowing the instrumentation of the music but not knowing who they will be recording with. The result is a dynamic cocktail of spontaneous, exciting, and highly rewarding music.
As Paul explains it, The response has been staggering and proved just how passionate everyone is about making new music. I sifted through the top musicians available and picked a band utilising trumpet/trombone/tenor sax/piano/bass/drums. It dawned on me that it could be fun to keep them in the dark about who they were going to be recording with on the day and Secret Sessions was born. The only information they had was instrumentation, to aid them in their arrangements and what time and where they needed to be. We began the series with Fragile Eagle and had a blast.
Now we are onto our second release, Hoop, with an entirely different set musicians and we are absolutely delighted with the results of this album in an afternoon session. We did some post-production work on the tracks, with additional instrumentation added later. However, the core of the music was seven people in a studio playing live. The music is vastly different from the first Secret Sessions release and is reminiscent of the fusion/jazz funk/jazz rock era.
The core band is as good as it gets: Tom Walsh (trumpet), Nichol Thomson (trombone), Paul Booth (tenor sax & bass clarinet), Chris Allard (guitars), Laurence Cottle (electric bass) and Ian Thomas (drums). They are joined on a handful of tracks by Steve Hamilton (keys), Miles Bould (percussion) and Ross Stanley (Hammond organ).
