The saxophone has always been a mongrel instrument – half woodwind, half brass – which is possibly why it is so heavily associated with a mongrel music such as jazz. Conversely, John Harle has tended to explore a non-jazz canon of music for the instrument, from Debussy to Michael Nyman, via Marc Almond, Elvis Costello and countless soundtracks.
Tonight’s concert at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama – where he is visiting professor – launches Harle’s new Faber book (a heavily illustrated technical tome called The Saxophone). It also belatedly celebrates his 60th birthday, for which he’s invited several modern composers to write something for him. “I think some of them thought they were writing for a youthful 16 year old,” he said, referring to the fast, spiky, mischievous and, frankly, ugly pieces by Graham Fitkin and Sally Beamish.
Harle is better suited to pieces where we can relish his long, bel canto lines – like a cathedral chorister on the soprano sax, like Maria Callas on the alto. Pianist Steve Lodder (Harle’s accompanist for the evening) pens a soulful, Sketches of Spain-tinged modal melody called Cranbourne Close; Gavin Bryars provides Harlesden, a bucolic study that mixes fluttery circular breathing passages with sustained lines.
Sax players can’t really avoid jazz, and Harle provides a genteel, oboe-like job on two Duke Ellington songs and a delightful sonata by Phil Woods. For an encore, however, Harle performs his arrangement of an Albinoni concerto – played in tight harmonies as a duet with Guildhall student Tom Gimson on soprano. He jokes about it “sounding like Alan Hawkshaw’s theme to Ski Sunday”, but it is a perfect example of how Harle can contextualise ancient music for this mongrel instrument.
• This article was amended on 21 March 2017. An earlier version misspelled Tom Gimson’s surname as Grimson.
