“We spend a lot of time as improvisers trying to be highly polished, but really a lot of the interesting music happens when things don’t work out the way you expect.” Saxophonist/composer Sam Norris’s debut album Small Things Evolved Slowly will be released on 30 August. The single Un-ravel (link below) is launched tonight 28 June at Jazz at the Crypt in Camberwell.
Small Things Evolved Slowly, the Sam Norris Quartet’s debut album, is set for release in August. The album title, according to saxophonist and composer Norris, was carefully chosen — adapted from a quote by Erik Satie, one of the champions of small [musical] things, and reflecting the process by which the album, and the quartet, came to fruition. The music draws on influences from jazz, classical music and hip-hop, combining the three genres to create an original and striking sound. Norris explained more in this interview, ahead of the release of the album and a forthcoming tour.
Satie is an inspirational, musically important, figure for Norris. “I find him a really interesting character,” he said over Zoom, “He had a nickname when he was young, something like ‘Satie the Obscure,’ because he was into weird things. He wrote a great piece that’s a real inspiration for me, called Ogives, a stunning meditation on an idea, inspired by plainsong and Gregorian chant. I love how he commits to a single idea and explores it. Jazz musicians have lots of ideas at a time and improvisation can flow through a large number of ideas, but I like having a seed of something that you develop throughout the course of a piece, that one specific thing to explore. There are pieces on the album that I composed probably almost seven years ago, alongside more recent things. They start from a single idea then gradually grow, so that’s where Small Thing Evolved Slowly comes from.”
The title also reflects the development of Norris’ quartet with pianist Jay Verma, drummer Harry Ling and bassist Will Sach. “I met Jay when we were both at Nottingham University. Neither of us finished our degrees, we came to London after a couple of years, he went to the Guildhall and I studied at the Royal Academy. We’ve always had a very strong playing relationship. We played a lot of duo gigs, then when I moved to London I lived with Jay and Harry and the three of us started playing together. Harry was at the Guildhall as well. When we were at college there was a lot of cross pollination, I played all the time with people from the Guildhall or Trinity. I met Will a little bit later — he was also at the Academy. That was around 2018 or 2019, we started playing together casually, then began playing a few gigs.”
Norris graduated in 2021 and the quartet recorded the album at the Fish Factory in August 2023. “I’d always intended to make a record,” Norris explains, “It’s taken longer than I thought it would but I’m glad we waited. We’ve made something I’m happy with and we’ve had a long time to explore the music.” The group gigged every month for a few years, mainly in London, Oxford and Birmingham, which benefitted the recording process: “Because we had played the music together so often, it was just like we were in a room together and there just happened to be some microphones in there. We were playing as we would normally and it happened to be captured. That was really the spirit I wanted, spontaneous, not feeling forced.”
Unlike many jazz musicians, who make their hip-hop influences overt, this group’s use of the music is more subtle, which may have a lot to do with the old-school hip-hop legends A Tribe Called Quest. “They’re my favourite hip-hop artists. The reason that they speak to me so strongly is that they speak a lot about jazz in their lyrics and some high-profile jazz musicians appear on their recordings, Ron Carter, for example. I think A Tribe Called Quest understand the continuum from bebop to hip-hop, how so much of the rhythmic language of hip-hop and rap is based on the groundwork of bebop musicians, in terms of syncopation, phrasing, unusual rhythmic resolutions. So when I was writing this music and we were playing it — writing an idea and playing an idea are, for me, two quite separate things — I think in the playing of it I was hearing a lot more of that hip-hop type rhythmic language. Harry in particular is very across that way of playing, so I think those qualities were brought out in the playing of the music even though they weren’t consciously part of that initial seed.”
“Bright Winding Path” is dedicated to Canadian artist Matthew Wong, another influential figure in Norris’ life. “I take a really keen interest in other artforms, particularly painting. My parents took me to a lot of art exhibitions and I still go almost every week to look at some paintings — I paint myself, I’m not very good, but I try. My partner bought me a book of landscape paintings about five years ago and Matthew Wong was one of the artists. I’d never heard of him but I saw this one painting, Bright Winding Path, and I felt like I understood what he was trying to convey. It’s just a single figure on a path, within a mystical landscape. It felt akin to what I feel as a musician sometimes, it can feel like a solitary journey. You’re aiming for this thing, but it’s not always clear what that thing is. I felt that he captured that really beautifully.” When we spoke, Norris had recently returned from a visit to Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum to see a comparative exhibition of Van Gogh and Wong’s artworks. “Learning about how painters create their work, the technique but also the spark that causes them to make art, can sometimes be more inspiring than reading about other musicians. I feel a bit too close to other musicians, I suppose.”
Ahead of the album launch, Norris is releasing one track as a single: “Un-ravel,” the earliest piece on the album, written in 2018. “It’s about complicated systems and how, because they have many moving parts, they’re fragile and can fall apart. The form of the song is complex, there’s a lot happening. My motivation was to write a song with a complicated form but it didn’t matter if it went awry. We spend a lot of time as improvisers trying to be highly polished, but really a lot of the interesting music happens when things don’t work out the way you expect.”
Sam Norris, originally from Cambridge, is a contributor to UKJN.
Small Things Evolved Slowly is due for release on the Resonant Postcards label on 30 August with a launch at the Vortex the previous evening. Other confirmed tour dates for the Sam Norris Quartet are as follows:
4 September — Cherry Reds, Birmingham
3 October — Hot Numbers, Cambridge
4 November — The Parakeet, London
1 April 2025 — Fringe in the Round, Bristol.
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