Rob Cope – ‘Gemini’

For his second album on the Ubuntu Music label after Gods of Apollo (2019), Rob Cope doubles on soprano saxophone and bass clarinet and is joined by Andy Scott on tenor saxophone, Paul Clarvis on drums and Liam Noble on piano.

Cope has chosen his bandmates well. Scott, Clarvis and Noble have performed together for over 30 years. What’s more, Scott is one of Cope’s former teachers, and Cope has performed in Scott’s Group S, a nonet of saxophones ranging from sopranino to bass playing a mixture of classical/contemporary and improvised music.

This line-up’s classical/jazz roots are deeply entwined. Cope started off classically trained before studying jazz, and has appeared with the Halle and English Symphony Orchestras and with the Matthew Herbert Big Band; and Scott is a prolific classical and jazz composer as well as performer, perhaps best known for Dark Rain, a double saxophone concerto for wind orchestra. Paul Clarvis has performed with a who’s who of classical and jazz music, and beyond: from Leonard Bernstein and Harrison Birtwistle, to John Dankworth, to John Zorn, Elton John, Ravi Shankar and The Orb. And the ubiquitous Liam Noble is surely known to most LJN readers, being not only a fine pianist and composer but also a regular writer for London Jazz News.

Cope (like Scott) is a teacher, and it’s perhaps thanks to his pedagogic instincts that the CD comes with reviewer-friendly sleeve notes explaining the origins and inspirations behind the tracks – all of which are Cope originals. “Voices” is “an introduction to each musician. I wanted to write a simple melody for us to explore as a band.” It meets the brief, bass clarinet and tenor saxophone weaving a simple motif into an expressive counterpoint, then seamlessly switching to a Clarvis/Noble duo of sleepy last-orders-at the-bar piano and scattered drums that for me had a Tom Waites vibe.

Other information gleaned from those reviewer-friendly notes are that “Together” was inspired by knowledge sharing between teacher and student, represented by soprano and tenor saxophone playing in unison before breaking away into individual voices. “Gemini” represents Cope’s journey from classical to jazz via a soprano saxophone cadenza that breaks into improvisation. “Up” celebrates the joy of playing challenging melodies, and is inspired by a duo of Columbian saxophonists called Jefferson Salcedo and Juan Camilo Doria. Other lively and complex tunes include “The Dance” (inspired by synchronicity, it has an almost klezmer-like melody) and a frenetic blues called “Laika”. This latter track is “about the endless energy, enthusiasm and loyalty that dogs have”. Given Cope’s fascination with space travel (his first album, Gods of Apollo, was inspired by the space race and included archival audio from NASA), the Laika in question must surely be the Soviet space dog who flew in Sputnik 2. So while the whirligig tune was intended to convey the boundless energy of dogs, it also unfortunately suggested to me (dog-lovers look away) what this poor dog may have felt when she was flung into space and spun around the Earth’s orbit with no hope of returning alive.

In marked contrast, “Across” is a gentle track of rippling and hypnotic ostinati from bass clarinet, tenor saxophone and piano, from which a tenor solo gradually swells and subsides; and “Water” is a Cope/Scott duo that begins and ends in calm waters with a squally interlude, Cope starting with bass clarinet and switching to soprano saxophone. Continuing the watery theme is “Rain”, which Cope wrote as a prequel to Scott’s double saxophone concerto Dark Rain and which takes inspiration from the biting dissonance of the concerto’s opening cadenza – a musical tension reflected in Noble’s jangling piano and Clarvis’s agitated drumming. If it’s rain, it’s a downpour.

Cope provides a further nod to Scott’s compositional influence with “Little Glass Box”, originally recorded (on the Group S album Ruby and All Things Purple) for saxophone nonet and rhythm section. Cope compresses it back into its original two-part form, a neat metaphor for the magic trick that gives the track its title, namely using sleight of hand to turn a deck of cards into a glass box. “Punch” is inspired by “that feeling when you want to punch the air with excitement”. With Clarvis on drums improvising over a punchy tenor saxophone riff topped by soprano saxophone it has a similar energy to the saxophone/drums duo Binker and Moses.

The album concludes fittingly with “Generations”, a return to the teacher-pupil theme as Cope dedicates it to Jim Muirhead, his teacher for eight years at school. “Generations of musicians have passed knowledge down over and over,” Cope writes in the sleeve notes, “and this piece contemplates our musical ancestry and just how far back it truly goes.”

And forwards too. Who knows which of Cope’s own students might one day lead an album of originals inspired by, and performed with, their mentors? It’s an exciting prospect.