English saxophonist John Harle spends time exploring eclectic worlds of jazz, minimalism and orchestral music.

Everybody knows that there's no musician cooler than a saxophone player, just so long as he's not also the chief executive. The question is whether a classical saxophonist can still be cool.

John Harle, who makes his San Francisco Symphony debut this week with Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas in works by Denny and Ingolf Dahl, offers a pretty good answer for it. Sure, the 43-year old Englishman plays the wonderful works written for his instrument by the great masters, including Glazunov, Villa-Lobos, Ibert, Milhaud and a few others. But most of hi time is spent at the edge of the current musical scene, where jazz, rock, minimalism and hard-core modernism rub elbows.

 

A Multifaceted Thing

"I think playing the saxophone has to be a multifaceted kind of thing," Harle said recently on the phone from London, where he lives. "I'm drawn to composers such as Harrison Birtwistle, who expect sax players to be multilayered in their understanding of music. You can come to that from either of two ways, from the contemporary classical approach, as I have, or like the players who come from a jazz background but find notated music a problem.

Of course, there are purists on both sides, I'm not one of them. I'm right in the middle."

Harle's eclectic interests and dynamic mystery of his instrument have earned him commissions (including no fewer than 16 concertos) from composers such as Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, Richard Rodney Bennett, Mark-Anthony Turnage and John Tavener. He is an active composer as well, collaborating with musical figures such as Elvis Costello, Ute Lemper and Paul McCartney.

All of this has the effect of lending spark to an instrument that - for all its cachet in the world at large - casts a somewhat dowdier profile in the symphonic hall.

"There's a lot of conservative teaching of the saxophone within academia," Harle says. "Even though composers are embracing jazz as the language of contemporary music, a lot of the teaching is still rather retro."

That in turn leads to a timorous approach on the part of modern classical performers, Harle says.

"I don't think there are a lot of saxophone players these days who want to commission new stuff. They get protective of the instrument's history without wanting to add to it by doing something new. Mostly they seem to spend time on the Internet talking about Sigmund Rascher."

 

Expanding the Range

Rascher was the midcentury American saxophonist who expanded the range of the instrument and commissioned a large number of solo works - including Dahl's concerto, whose 1949 premiere featured Raschler as soloist.

Dahl was Thomas' teacher at the University of Southern California, and although Thomas has recorded a CD of his music (including the Saxophone Concerto) with the New World Symphony, this week marks the first time one of Dahl's compositions has appeared on a San Francisco program.

The concerto combines several of Dahl's musical interests, from the neo-Baroque opening movements to the ebullient rondo finale that owes much to the big-band era (among other activities, Dahl once worked as an arranger for Tommy Dorsey).

That sort of mix is just the kind of thing to suit Harle, who grew up in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne with an industrialist father who encouraged his love of jazz.

"It was thanks to my father that I managed to meet Duke Ellington when I was 16. I was at his Westminster Abbey concert, the last one he did in England. And there he was, rehearsing at 7:25 for a 7:30 concert with all the people there - he didn't care."

"So I walked up to him in my school blazer and said, 'Maestro, would you sign an autograph?' When he found out I was a saxophonist, he introduced me to Harry Carney and all of the other band members."

Harle actually started out at 11 as a clarinettist, then added the saxophone to his repertoire at 14.

"I veered all through my teenage years between liking jazz best and liking classical. I went through the unusual romantic adolescent phase of liking Tchaikovsky, then I suddenly decided that Miles Davis was it."

"So I decided to find an instrument that had a home in both worlds, and I could see the clarinet restricting the genres I could explore. Because, lets face it, no matter how much you like Benny Goodman, it was always a passe instrument for jazz."

After two years playing both instruments in an army band, Harle enrolled in the Royal College of Music, where he studied with Daniel Deffayet, the leading classical saxophonist of the day. There followed several years of trying to establish a niche for himself in the musical scenes of London and New York, a process helped considerably by a 1982 award from the Concert Artists' Guild in New York.

 

Composing, Performing and Teaching

Today, he divides his time mostly between composing - he has 25 concert works and 40 film and television scores to his credit - and performing. He also teaches saxophone at the Guildhall School in London.

Among his forthcoming projects are a double concerto for cello and saxophone written for him by Turnage, and next year's world premiere of Tavener's "Total Eclipse," which Harle says will mark the first time the composer has ever allowed a musician to improvise in performance.

But first there is Harle's visit to San Francisco, a place of which he has fond memories from his first visit in the early 1980's.

"I played in San Francisco when I was on tour with Michael Nyman, and it's a place I had always wanted to come back to - maybe on holiday with my kids. Well, I'll be playing with the orchestra instead." Cool.

top

 

---

The man who has brought sheer sax to musicals

Saxophonist and composer John Harle has never been afraid to experiment, leaving critics raging and raving. His jazz rearrangement of the Fifties musical The Pajama Game opens tonight. Wait for the fireworks. By David Benedict.

"Watching Leonard Bernstein eat a lobster was quite the most disgusting thing in the world." Amused amazement lights up the face of saxophonist and composer; John Harle. "He ate it with such vigour. It went everywhere." Not that Harle is an overly fastidious man. He's an omnivorous enthusiast, a truly unfashionable state of mind in a self - conscious age of irony, but something which links him with the late American master.

He used to take the piss out of me for playing the suite from On the Waterfront too jazzily, but I used to say to him: 'How about a saxophone concerto?' and he'd say, 'Look, if you ask me that once more Éin America I'm asked to write a saxophone concerto every 30 seconds'."

The concerto never happened, but one suspects that Harle doesn't waste hours in regret. At 43, Harle has had 17 concertos written for him and number 18 is on the way from John Tavener; whose rhapsodic music shot up the charts after being played at the funeral of Princess Diana. That alone gives you a clue to Harle's musical identity that effortlessly straddles the often opposing worlds of so-called "popular" and "serious" music.

This former soloist with the Band of the Coldstream Guards plays around 60 gigs a year (with everyone from Elvis Costello to Michael Nyman and Richard Rodney Bennett); composes scores for film and TV; is a professor music at London's Guildhall School; and a record producer. If that doesn't bring new (and bestselling) meaning to the dangerous term "cross-over", try his witty and eclectic rearrangement of the score for the 1954 Broadway musical, The Pajama Game, which opens tonight in a chic new production.

The musical is yet another new venture. He met the director; Simon Callow, when playing at the National Theatre almost 20 years ago, but when the idea of re-arranging the score of this smart-mouthed, comic love story - set during a strike in a pyjama factory - came up, he could not initially see his way through it. But Callow knew his lustrous album of Ellington arrangements, In the Shadow of the Duke, and he persuaded him that he could make the music sound - in the true sense of the word - cool.

"The seminal music of the period was Gil Evans and Miles Davis and the beginnings of the 'cool' period. We treated the songs so that they reflect the jazz music of the Fifties". Together with top-flight arrangers - Gary Carpenter, Iain Gardner and Dick Walter - he's played fast and loose with rhythms, filling the score with the moods of the Fifties, rather than the standard Broadway sound which was fast beginning to sound dated.

There are instantly recognisable Fifties echoes, such as the mooning vibraphone tones made famous by the Modern Jazz Quartet, redolent of a million cocktail lounges. They've even turned the joyous, climactic wage-rise march "Seven and a Half cents" into something more complex. "It now has more to do with something like Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges," he grins. "Without being untrue to the original, I think we've placed it in another part of American culture."

He's a dab hand at this kind of cross-culturalism, even bringing in Ladysmith Black Mambazo for Lesley Garrett's next album which he is producing, a collaboration certain to induce apoplexy in purists who bridle at Harle's refusal to sit in one particular box.

A thorny issue, evidently. "Richard Eyre calls it the difference between primary and secondary creation. If you're a primary creator then you write the thing that everybody works towards realising. For a musician or an actor who starts to write, the journey from secondary interpreter to being a primary creator doesn't seem a large leap, but for critics that journey is seen as massive. It entirely alters the way they view you." He sees it as a controlling and peculiarly British attitude, and he's not alone. Michael Nyman has often complained about the intransigence of opinion that frowns upon his work for its supposed lack of high seriousness.

As a performer/ composer - which appears to mean that he'll never be accepted into the aristocracy of English music - does this similarly upset Harle? "Naah," he says, convincingly. "Nyman has a terrible time because they say he cannot compose. That's very, very hurtful. His very ability to do his job is in question. Nobody is about to tell me that I can't play the saxophone." Listening to the astonishing depth and range of tone he produces on alto, tenor, and notably the soprano sax - "a bastard of an instrument" - this isn't arrogance, it's fact.

But it does partly explain why his first opera, Angel Magick, met with both rage and rave reviews from different sides of the press. Several critics sneered at his combining of traditional harmonic structures and 20th century serial techniques for their different expressive and dramatic capabilities.

For a while, he considered writing a joke piece in which an old devil admitted to his therapist that around 1915 he'd visited a well-known Viennese composer and told him that the whole history of music had been wrong. The 12 tones of the octave were meant to be organised in a numerical way, the previous tonal system was a complete mistake and that music had to be reinvented. Unfortunately, the composer took him seriously É but he'd meant it as a joke. He was now really sorry, because from that moment on music was never liked and he'd started the division between serious and popular music.

"It might have been funny", he observes, "but it would have appeared rather reactionary." In the light of his passionate advocacy of certain hardline contemporary composers - he famously premiered Harrison Birtwistle's Panic to boos at the Proms - that story might also appear strikingly contrary. In fact, he views Schoenberg's experiment as a massive opportunity that created a new aural vocabulary. Indeed, Harle is startlingly eloquent on the usually woolly subject of our response to the "natural" intervals of the standard harmonic series and the aesthetics of music. If he can squeeze it into his dairy he should, like Bernstein, write and broadcast about it.

Next year's diary includes writing 10 hours of music for Simon Schama's BBC History of Britain. Does he, just possibly, do too much? He concedes his last year has been "bonkers" but argues that now he only does what he believes he can do well. Certainly, his alarming schedule is moving closer to a marriage between composition and playing, writing for himself and friends like Evelyn Glennie.

"As one gets older, you become less keen on impressing people. There were years when I played a million notes on the saxophone and even some of my early albums seem like a very talented sixth former showing off."

He looks straight at me with calm confidence. "Now I care less about the overall impression, and more about feeling that I really want to do something."

top

---

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

The black arts, high drama, philosophy and poetry: John Harle's opera Angel Magik, set in 16th-century England has it all (even Queen Elizabeth I pops in for tea). And it still manages to break the rules.

The domestic arrangements in the Mortlake home of John Dee, Elizabethan magus and neo-Platonist herald of the English renaissance, might not at first sight seem to provide the ideal setting for contemporary opera, even if Good Queen Bess is always popping for tea. What with the poets Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser arguing the toss, and that Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno putting his oar in, there is an awful lot of ideas to contend with.

And there's the odd couple, of crusty Dr Dee and his frankly rather difficult assistant, Edward Kelley, always trying to summon up angels with those spells of theirs. What poor old Mrs Dee makes of it, god knows, and she's not looking too well either, if you ask me.

But out of this late 16th-century soap, the composer John Harle and his librettist David Pountney have made an opera of the proper sort, and one which almost breaks the rules of the genre by appearing to work well as drama as well as music. Spells are cast, angels are summoned, and the characters exchange views on the music of the spheres and other recondite matters, but as singers and actors in a theatrical space they succeed in holding your attention. And although the piece deals with complex ideas in a fairly complex manner, it remains clear and direct almost throughout, even if a little background reading would enhance a greater appreciation of the historical background.

Given a sneak preview as part of the Salisbury Festival in May, Angel Magik proved to be a resounding success, The singing, by Sarah Leonard as Queen Elizabeth, William Purefoy as Sidney, Jacqueline Miura as Spenser, Andrew Forbes-Lane as Bruno, and Donald Maxwell as Kelley, was particularly fine, and Christopher Good in the non-singing role of Dr Dee provided a satisfying down-to-earth centre for the airy perorations of the other principals to evolve around. The music - by the Bauhaus Band and Fretwork, conducted by Harle himself - served the purposes of the drama admirably, and it remained suitably rigorous in its attention to historical detail while never descending into the kind of cod-Elizabethan pastiche that could have been expected. Only the taped voice that was used to declaim the equivalent of chapter headings at the beginning of each movement (which follow an astrological sequence of planets) jarred a little, sounding perhaps a little too close to Mastermind for comfort.

On the morning of the first of the two performances as Salisbury, John Harle could be heard as the guest on Desert Island Discs, and his incredibly wide-ranging selections perhaps provide a clue to Angel Magik's musical influences. As a schoolboy at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (he traces his love of history to being taught there by William Feaver, now The Observer's art critic), in the late Sixties, Harle fell under the spell of Pentangle, the pop-folk group whose guitarist, John Renbourn, used to play a number of transcriptions from both Elizabethan and Jacobean sources.

The Desert Island selection also included a tune by the Beatles, testifying to Harle's abiding belief in melody; a piece by Duke Ellington, whose alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges' limpidly beautiful tone was one of the reasons Harle took up the saxophone (still considered a rather vulgar arriviste in the classical world) as well as the clarinet; and an excerpt from one of Harrison Birtwistle's most confrontational works, the mini-opera Punch and Judy, whose proud dissonances must have led to pre-Sunday lunch panic attacks in the kitchens of the nation.

When Harle performed Birwistle's Panic - one of 16 concerti written specially for him - at the Proms in 1995, he experienced the perils of the avant-garde at first hand. Famously, the performance was booed by a noisy coterie of fogies. Harle first met Birtwistle as an actor-musician at the National Theatre in the late seventies (where the composer was the NT's music director), following an unusual background where he served as a bandsman with the Coldstream Guards before entering the Royal College of Music (he is now a professor of saxophone at the Guildhall). But despite his long established working relationship with Birtwistle, Harle retains an almost evangelical faith in tonality, and it is from this - as much as anything else - that Angel Magik stems. "At the heart of my music is a belief in tonality, and what was originally thought of as the science of music," Harle says. "It's the Pythagorean concept that there is a tonality in each of us; a belief in music as it appears in nature."

This regard for music as, well, music, is reflected in Harle's interest in popular forms, including jazz. He writes soundtracks for film and television (including Silent Witness) and performs with the jazz saxophonist Andy Sheppard in Twentieth Century Saxophones. His last major recording, Terror and Magnificence, included a collaboration with Elvis Costello. On Desert Island Discs, Harle also owned up to dark feelings about English culture. "English folk traditions have always interested me," he says. "Early pagan animal rituals; the theme of Arcadia in England, the Green Man, and the more secretive side of Englishness, such as the elements of Egyptology brought in by the Freemasons and the Victorians. In secret societies magic and alchemy were subversive forces, and I'm really fascinated by alchemy, the idea of making something out of nothing.

The definitions of music and magic - and once music was magic - aren't far from each other. It's not just basic academic stuff that interests me in Angel Magik, but the idea of creating a fantasy about these people."

For Harle, the models for his opera (which is the first) are more Brecht and Weill than Shakespeare and Dowland. "There are elements of Elizabethan music, but it's as if they are seen through a veil. What I can't bear in opera is the stagnant drama of it, so my music plays right up to the action." In Angel Magik, which could be subtitled "Dr Flee's Casebook", the mundane and the metaphysical are mixed "very effectively". The old gent tries to summon up an angel, while in the material world of Mortlake everything around him is falling apart. And whoops, there goes the doorbell. It must be Good Queen Bess.

top

---

Big, bad John - The adventure

There's nothing half-hearted about John Harle. This big, deceptively easygoing man, with a merciless line in mocker - of himself and others - fell in love with the saxophone at a time in the seventies when hardly anybody else in classical music took it seriously. That might have helped him cope later with the frenzy that greeted his premiere of Harrison Birtwistle's uncompromisingly byzantine sax concerto in 1995's Last Night of the Proms.

Harle plays everything he touches with conviction, whether it's his show or not. As Michael Nyman's regular saxophonist, it's his delicately incisive soprano sax you can hear on that composer's famous soundtrack for the film The Piano.

An ex-Army bandsman who often hilariously reconstructs the Bilko-esque antics of his military days, Harle loves the classical world's precision and order, but dislikes its conservatism of repertoire. He is testing musical tolerances to the limit by touring a band that combines a string quartet, a classical soprano, jazz saxist Andy Sheppard, and Elvis Costello singing Shakespeare.

"People now expect composers to have multi-disciplinary skills, but it's about musical coherence more than simply expecting audiences to go "Wow!" if you just throw a string quartet and a group of panpipers from the Andes on a stage together. I've tried not to take people out of context."

Nailing his colours to the mast with typical brio, he has called the show (and the newly released album) Terror and Magnificence. Nothing as frivolous for him as an Evening with John and Elvis. It plays its final gig at the Royal Festival Hall tonight as part of the Oris London Jazz Festival.

In Manchester earlier this week, the band played to an initially reserved audience of classical fans surprised by the volume, Sheppard fans surprised by the careful order, Costello fans surprised by the lack of rock 'n' roll.

But the point grew on them. The Sheppard fans shifted a little closer to the edges of their seats when the jazzman's swooping, buffeting tenor sax soliloquies began to intertwine with Harle's pure, stately lyricism. Costello's faithfuls cheered his handling of O Mistress Mine.

"People singing Shakespeare are usually afraid of singing the songs for the emotions are really in them - they're worried about missing some crucial urtext," said Harle afterwards. "But Declan (Costello) just sweeps that aside."

Terror and Magnificence itself, a long two-saxophone feature moving between haunting, ethereal high-note themes and thrashing, percussive odysseys, revealed more of its intended tensions than it has before. The collisions between what sound like eighties club grooves and the 14th century French poetry on the backing tape were far less distracting than they have been previously - though if Harle's music could be tightened, it might be by curbing his fondness for the unambiguous soft-funk underpinnings that occasionally put banana skins under the philosophical speculations of the titles.

Harle once let on that he feared Sheppard's spontaneity, while Sheppard was anxious about Harle's precision. But the interplay between the two is now remarkably relaxed. And the contrast of the voices - Costello's bruised, yearning sound on the Shakespeare sonnets, Sarah Leonard's cool, unfussy clarity - remoulds treacherously familiar material to make it glow again with a seductive light.

If Harle rejects the convenient crossover tag, does he still perceive himself as a classical musician on a gig like this? "I choose to be regarded as a classical musician," he says emphatically. "I believe in classical proportion and classical reasonings.

"But there's room for extemporisation, when it's knitted within the proportions. Andy and I did Hunting the Hare completely differently and about twice as long in Manchester as we did elsewhere, but it was still absolutely true to the structure."

Hunting the Hare began out of nowhere in Manchester - a wild, whooping sax exchange turning to the soft caress of the theme, and then contrasting Sheppard's gritty sonorousness against Harle's haughty delicacy. It was maybe the best example of what Harle is driving at. Both artists embraced the idea of music as written, but both had the space to be utterly themselves.

John Fordham, The Guardian

top

 

---

The Works, Issue 11

 top