Trish Clowes

Trish Clowes is a saxophonist, composer, and educator based in London. An improviser of considerable skill, she juxtaposes moment-to-moment creativity with an adventurous approach to modern composition that straddles post-bop and classical music. Her playing style explores the instrument's tonal and multiphonic potential without regard for artificial limits. Her tone is clean, resonant, and airy, wedding intimate lyricism to complex, sometimes muscular harmonics. She began her long association with the independent Basho label upon release of Tangent, her 2010 debut. The set highlighted nine original compositions for jazz quartet and chamber musicians. 2012's And in the Night-Time She Is There resulted in a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist designation and founding the Emulsion Festival. 2014's breakthrough, Pocket Compass, featured works for quintet in association with the BBC Concert Orchestra. 2016's globally acclaimed, magically whimsical My Iris also became the name of her quartet. She followed it with 2019's more exploratory, vanguard Ninety Degrees Gravity. Clowes signed with Dave Douglas' Greenleaf Music label for 2022's A View with a Room. Clowes was born in the 1980s and raised in Shrewsbury. She studied piano and clarinet in elementary school before adopting the tenor and soprano saxophones in secondary school. She moved to London in 2003 to study at the Royal Academy of Music. Her influences are as varied as her music and include Lester Young, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, John Coltrane, Joe Lovano, and Wayne Shorter. Her instructors included saxophonist Iain Ballamy and composer Hans Koller. She gigged in clubs and in classical settings while completing a master's degree in composition. She formed the quintet Tangent and issued a self-titled album on the venerable independent Basho label. That band included future My Iris members James Maddren on drums and guitarist Chris Montague. It also featured acclaimed pianist Gwilym Simcock. Clowes' album got attention from critics for her composing skills and juxtaposing her post-bop group with classical chamber musicians from strings to brass and reeds. Following the critical success of her debut album and tour, Jamie Cullum, Gilles Peterson, and Jez Nelson selected Clowes to perform on the BBC Introducing stage at Cheltenham Jazz Festival in 2011, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Tangent performed during the Proms Plus Late series at the Royal Albert Hall. In 2012 Clowes issued the lyrical And in the Night-Time She Is There. She highlighted her quartet -- Simcock appended the ensemble on four tracks -- alongside a chamber string quintet. Once more delighting critics, Clowes appeared at the London Jazz Festival playing the music of Barbara Thompson. She was also featured on BBC Radio 3's Jazz on 3 at Ronnie Scott's and for Jazz Line Up at the Royal Festival Hall. From 2012 to 2014 Clowes served as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist. She traveled to California in 2013 to meet Wayne Shorter, who influenced her composing style as well as her playing. She was commissioned by the station to write for the BBC Concert Orchestra -- her work won a British Composer Award in 2015. That year she founded and curated the Emulsion Festival, funded by a grant; the festival's purpose is to explore collective practice and audience interaction through composition. Her featured guest that year was Ballamy. 2014's Pocket Compass -- using a quintet with Simcock on piano full-time -- proved an international breakthrough. The album premiered at the EFG London Jazz Festival in 2014 alongside the debut of her first BBC commission "The Fox, The Parakeet & The Chestnut," the culmination of her two years as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist. Clowes' commission also took home the award in the Contemporary Jazz Composition category at 2015's British Composer Awards. She won praise from critics across Europe and the United States. She performed at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama for the first time while touring across England and Europe. In August 2015, Clowes made her television performance debut on BBC 2 for BBC Proms Extra, performing her own "Little Tune." That year she also formed a new trio with pianist/organist Ross Stanley and guitarist Montague, and became a member of Under Your Wing, a song-based ensemble featuring Norma Winstone and Mike Walker. In 2016 Clowes issued My Iris, the self-titled offering from a new quartet that included Stanley on piano and organ in place of Simcock, as well as Maddren and Montague. The name refers to Greek mythology's goddess of the rainbow. The set's complex juxtaposition of post-bop, spidery jazz-funk (à la early Weather Report), and whimsical melodies, won accolades across the globe for its agile, harmonic imagination and ideational economy of ideas that placed a new weight on collective improvisation. My Iris toured internationally and participated in broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 and Radio Bremen. The group followed with Ninety Degrees Gravity in 2019. Opening with "Eric's Tune" -- inspired by former Weather Report drummer Eric Kamau Gravatt -- the set cut across swinging melodic and modal post-bop, and knotty progressive and vanguard jazz. Clowes released "Abbot & Costello" as both a single and video directed by filmmaker Rose Hendry. Both tune and video were inspired by characters in director Denis Villeneuve's science fiction film Arrival. It was screened at the Cannes Lions Festival and was shortlisted for The Voice of a Woman Awards in 2019. In 2020, Clowes received a doctorate in Musical Composition, awarded by Birmingham City University (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire). That April she self-released My Iris Live, taken from performances for Moving on Music in Belfast and at the Galway Jazz Festival. That fall, Hawaii Hawaii Hawaii, a live collaboration with composer and educator Joe Cutler and the BBC Radio Orchestra directed by Ben Palmer, was released to streaming. In late 2020, Clowes began cutting repertoire during the pandemic for various livestream events, she wrote new tunes for each playing opportunity. She signed to Dave Douglas' Greenleaf Music label, and in April 2022 issued the full-length A View with a Room with My Iris. Some tracks made direct reference to issues created and exacerbated by the global pandemic. Three other tracks celebrate women who have inspired Clowes: "Amber" is for Amber Bauer, CEO of Donate4Refugees (for which the saxophonist is an ambassador); "Ayana" is dedicated to Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, writer, marine biologist, and policy expert, who speaks clearly and positively on climate change. "The Ness" was a response to the images and sounds captured by Hendry along the East Neuk of Fife coastline in Scotland. A View with a Room was internationally released in April 2022. When not touring or recording, Clowes teaches regularly at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the Royal Academy of Music, and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.
© Thom Jurek /TiVo