Taking Off: Adrian Cox

Despite a playing style once cruelly described in this magazine as “Adrian Cox’s foghorn clarinet”, the UK’s acclaimed jazz exponent of that instrument has now chosen to go uncharacteristically quiet. His new album is titled Clarinet Fantasy, and features a string quartet. Listening to it is a gorgeous but faintly unsettling experience: the tunes are dark and intimate, with a film noir quality to them, as if written to accompany Fred MacMurray on his way to another illicit rendezvous with Barbara Stanwyck.

The impression of restrained power on these recordings, which were made at Gun Hill Studios in Sussex, has a lot to do with the fact that all the musicians were recorded in the same physical space.

“When you see old photographs of Louis and Ella recording,” says Cox, “they’re in big rooms - they’re not in booths. This whole thing of separation - it wasn’t like that at Gun Hill. We were in a circle. Everyone could see each other. High ceiling, beautiful reverb… I could play the clarinet how I wanted to play it. The amount of times I go into a recording studio, and I’m trying to get my own reverb, and they go, ‘Oh no, we can put that in afterwards.’ But that’s not me.” As soon as you isolate musicians in booths, he says, they become tentative in their playing.

“I played the record to someone the other day, and he said, ‘You can walk around it, you can see everything. It feels like you’re there’, which is such a nice thing to hear, because that was the aim at the end of the day, to make it sound as live as possible.”

Adrian Cox has come a long way since leaving his parents’ home in Burgess Hill, Sussex, half-way through his GCSEs to join the band of a Devon-based trad trumpet player called Richard Bennett. In his first year with Bennett, he played no fewer than 326 gigs. Later he moved to London, joined the piano player TJ Johnson, and worked with him all over Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Holland and Germany. “It was heavy touring and heavy drinking. Living the dream, and drinking myself to death.” (He’s sober now.)

Clarinet Fantasy was recorded in October 2021, yet is only being released now. The long gaps between recording, mixing, mastering and release have been a calculated part of the process. “Rupert [Cobb], who recorded it and was mixing it as well, said he wasn’t going to listen to it for six months. He said, ‘If you want me to do it properly, I need to be away from it, and come back to it completely fresh – no preconceived ideas.’” Cobb finally began mixing in March 2022, and another couple of months passed before mastering.

How did Cox feel when he finally heard it in its completed state?

“I sat down and listened to it properly, and I was hugely excited. It took me back to the whole two days of recording it, and it was the most chilled-out, relaxed recording session I’ve ever done in my life. There was no stress. I was doing a session with all my best friends, and all the people I respect most in the music industry.”

These best friends were long-time collaborators Joe Webb (piano), Denny Ilett (guitar), Will Sach (bass) and Shane Forbes (drums), whose low-key work on Clarinet Fantasy is enhanced by a string quartet led by the cellist Gabriella Swallow.

Cox’s inspiration for the project came initially from hearing an obscure 1944 EP, released on the Rex ‘Experiments in Modern Music’ label, featuring clarinettist Barney Bigard, who two years beforehand had been a celebrated member of Duke Ellington’s orchestra. On Fantasy for Clarinet and Strings, Bigard worked with the French-Egyptian arranger Roger Kay. Adrian Cox resolved to follow their example: he wrote the music, aided by Joe Webb, then took it to the arranger Philippe Maniez. “I wanted him to do the arrangements because it was him, not because I wanted him to do a version of what I wanted.”

One reason for the current interest in older styles of jazz is, thinks Cox, that we’re now living in an age of lo-fi, with plastic earbuds and tiny laptop speakers being the norm. The lack of hi-fidelity on pre-1950s records no longer sounds as alien as it used to. But Clarinet Fantasy sounds deep and beautiful, and entirely lacking in the old snap, crackle and pop of vintage shellac.

It will be premiered at Ronnie Scott’s on 1st April. What are Cox’s hopes for that gig?

“My style is pretty hard hitting New Orleans, a big fat sound. So it’s a different side of me that people haven’t really seen. A bit more romantic, a bit more in the way of beautiful melody writing. So I’m excited to play that music in front of people.”

He, his band and the string quartet are also playing Buxton Opera House on 8th July, where they will be joined by singer Tommy Blaize.

This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today