Album titles can be anything from poetic to enigmatic to downright baffling, but Chris Sansom‘s October release Unfinished Business gets straight to the point. It’s the long-postponed completion of a fascinating musical adventure, abandoned 50 years ago and brought back to life in 2024 by the now 74 year-old British composer – a stylistic maverick all his life whose influences include Frank Zappa, Beethoven, Arnold Schoenberg, prog-rock, and a lot more.
Sansom has dusted off a vivacious score jostling with startling ideas that he originally wrote for a jazz lineup called Perfect Stranger when he was a 24 year-old B.Mus graduate from London’s King’s College. But, hamstrung in 1974 by lack of practice space for a big ensemble, and the considerable time these kaleidoscopic pieces took to rehearse, Sansom’s first attempts to record the work back then fizzled out, and the young composer consigned it to a drawer for the next five decades.
This month it resurfaces, recreated by a formidably skilful jazz ensemble, nowadays thoroughly versed in 21st century genre-bending mixes and technically at ease with Sansom’s jump-cut transitions of rhythm, melodic motifs and harmony. ‘The music on this album is exactly half a century old at the time of release’, Sansom says, with modest pride. ‘It’s incredibly rewarding to finally bring it to life with such a talented group of musicians.’
The four movements of the album’s opener, ‘Life & Times (of a Perfect Stranger)’ follow a symphony-structure governed by The Golden Ratio, a formula that down the centuries has guided the geometry of Pythagoras and the practices of artists and artisans all the way from sculptors, architects and scientists to cosmetic surgeons and orthodontists. Across the four sections of ‘Life & Times’ the music embraces jazz-rock, classical sonata form, a waltz fizzing with jazz-improv outbursts, and a third part that unobtrusively splices three contrasting time signatures.
Elsewhere on the set, rocking themes or hymnal reveries pass through abrupt tempo variations, sometimes ending up played in reverse or upside down; bass-guitar and rhythm-section hooks turn to fast waltzes; Beethoven’s late-quartet ‘Great Fugue’ embraces shuffle grooves, funk, reggae, and a flying Charlie Parkeresque sequence that also pays homage to Schoenberg’s 12-tone serial system on ‘Arnold’s Bebop’. But Chris Sansom isn’t seeking to dazzle his audiences by wily acts of musical sleight-of-hand. For the most part, Unfinished Business reveals how the most complex musical ideas can nowadays be reinvented both accurately and freely by improv-savvy performers, helping to give the most intricately composed shapes the openness and fluidity of songs.
‘In 2019, I went to a gig at the Karamel club in Wood Green, where two fine jazz musicians, the saxophonist Chris Biscoe and trombonist Paul Nieman were both playing,’ Chris Sansom recalls when we speak on the phone about the seeds of this remarkable recreation. ‘Both of them had played on our original attempt to record this music, and it was great to catch up with them at the bar. Paul said to me “it would be good fun to have another go at that old project of yours”, and I began to think that it really could be. So the idea of redoing this music began to feel possible’.
Chris Sansom has taken a roundabout route to get back to where this project started. From the 1970s onwards, his life inside and outside music first took in work as an expert notation copyist for artists including Yehudi Menuhin, then as a promising contemporary-classical composer of works for string quartets, brass bands, chamber orchestras, even idiosyncratic visions of his own including a 60-solo-strings ensemble joined by keys, harp and percussion. A Sansom Trumpet Concerto was premiered in 1978 with the Grimethorpe Colliery Band under legendary brass-playing classical conductor Elgar Howarth, an invaluable early champion of the young composer’s work. In 1986, Sansom’s Invisible Cities featured the eminent Swedish trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger, with his compatriot Christian Lindberg on trombone, in performances with The Hague’s Residentie Orchestra and with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
But Sansom’s compositional creativity didn’t altogether cover life’s practicalities, and he developed a long-running parallel career at the helm of his own web-design business, while life’s music-making pleasures in the 21st century offered him diversions including playing electric bass in guitarist/singer Chris Ramsing’s now 14 year-old and pithily idiosyncratic trio PsychoYogi. But by 2019, retired from web-designing and with his 70s beckoning, those conversations with the original Perfect Stranger sidemen were growing increasingly alluring.
‘First of all I approached Chris Biscoe, because he’d been so important to the original band, and also because he’s such a nice bloke,’ Sansom says. ‘I asked him if he’d like to do it again, and he said that some of the time signatures in it would give him the heebie-jeebies nowadays! But he was so helpful, he gave me a great long list of players to invite. I should think probably half the people in the original band were on it. So in that situation, you ask one, and if they can’t do it they’ll suggest someone else, and one person leads to another’.
I ask Sansom how much of the original score has stayed the same, or if the passing years had tempted him to revise it?
‘Since we did it before, bits and bobs have evolved,’ the composer says. ‘On the last part of “Life and Times” after the drum solo you get this sort of anthem, hymn-like thing, which I only had a rough sketch of the first time around, so I arranged it more extensively for this recording. And somewhere near “Arnold’s Bebop”, in “Ludwig’s Van” there’s a section of reggae. I didn’t know anything about reggae in 1974. It had been a sort of pompous, overblown march-type thing then, which didn’t work very well, so I recast that as a reggae part. “Lugubrious Boots” has evolved in that middle section where the band goes berserk, because I was absolutely tickled to death by what the players were doing with it’.
This sounds like an embrace of collective improvisation, I suggest to the seasoned composer. ‘Well, I’d intended that section to be just a slow crumbling of the structure, before it gets back to the slow groove it had at the beginning,’ Sansom acknowledges. ‘It’s a rhythm-section feature really. But when Alcyona Mick on keys and the guitarist Eddy White and the others start really going for it in the open section, they were doing wonderful things of their own. It reminded me of someone who was doing that in Perfect Stranger 50 years ago – the late Pete Jacobsen, a blind jazz pianist with an incredible technique and memory. He once memorised a section I’d written in 7¾ over 4, then instantly transposed it up a semitone in his head because the piano we were using then was flat! Pete was unique, but some of what he could do has become the norm, particularly for conservatoire-trained young players now.’
Sansom sounds like a pretty animated septuagenarian on the phone, and energised afresh by the revival of a project that had contained the seeds of so much of a lifetime of musical ideas. From the way he talks about it, it doesn’t sound as if he’s thinking of Unfinished Business as his route to winding down.
‘I definitely want to continue with Perfect Stranger,’ Sansom emphasises. ‘I’m working up more repertoire for the band, not all of it mine this time, and I already have some tentative thoughts for a next album. I’ve been working on some transcription-cum-arrangements including a piece of Frank Zappa’s called “Sinister Footwear 2”, which is full of tuplets and going to be murderous to play. And a piece that we already do and will be doing on this tour, Charles Mingus’ “Children’s Hour of Dream”, from the enormous Epitaph suite that was discovered after his death. It’s a weird piece, and it’ll be the least jazz of all the things we do, absolutely fully notated, even the drum parts. But it stood out from everything else in Epitaph for me – not because it was the best music, but because it was so strange’
Catching the qualities of strangeness always sounds like a high priority for Chris Sansom. Maybe, far from wrapping a long-postponed story up, Unfinished Business is more like a challenge to his inquisitive nature to explore new possibilities, with new collaborators. ‘Making this recording with these players made me feel that I’ve sometimes over-composed,’ Sansom reflects. ‘For the future, I think I should give them their head more. Some of the younger deps that we’ve used lately are very recent conservatoire graduates and it’s astonishing what they can do. They just pick up my insane charts and play them. Back when I was a student, I was interested in mixing jazz and rock methods with classical ideas. Right now seems a great time to be doing that.’
Musicians:
Chris Sansom (composer/conductor/fretless bass), Adam Bishop, Mick Foster (saxes/woodwinds), Shanti Jayasinha (trumpet/flugel), Tom Green (trombone), Alcyona Mick (keyboards), Rob Millett (percussion), Eddy White (guitars), Paul Michael (bass guitar) and Jonas Golland (drums).
UK tour gigs:
Progress Theatre, Reading, October 25
Karamel, London, N22, November 1
Royal Hotel, Southend, November 6
Puppet Theatre, Norwich, November 30.
