Video of the day: saxophonist Phil Bancroft talks about his new Myriad Streams platform and new album Degrees of Freedom

Described by The Guardian’s John Fordham as “a significant figure in the ascent of the Scottish new-jazz scene’’, Bancroft is best known for work with award-winning Trio AAB and his international quartet featuring Reid Anderson, Thomas Strønen and Mike Walker.

Degrees of Freedom, Bancroft’s new album of beautiful original tracks for Quartet, features Paul Harrison on piano, Stu Ritchie on drums and Aidan O’Donnell on bass. It heralds a major move as the first of eight albums to be released on Myriad Streams, a brand-new bespoke artist-led web platform. “Myriad Streams is conceived as an antidote to Spotify,” explains Bancroft. “A human not industrial scale presentation of culture, providing a calm place for listeners to get to know one artist - without 100,000 other artists clamouring for their attention.”

Myriad Streams’ exciting album series include a re-release of Bancroft’s International Quartet’s album Headlong, The Salmon’s Tail – an orchestral epic by Kevin Murray, Hungry Star – a newly-recorded Trio album with Scottish guitarist Graeme Stephen and Tabla player Gyan Singh, Live at the Blue Lamp by Bancroft’s Standards Trio with brother Tom on drums and Testimony – an improvised solo saxophone suite.

The platform will also showcase the wide range of Bancroft’s projects and collaborations with previously unavailable studio and live recordings by his International Quartet, multi-media project ‘Home, Small as The World’, plus tracks from Trio AAB, Colin Steele’s Stramash, Aidan O’Rourke’s (Lau) Nufolk/jazz crossover album Hotline, John Rae’s Celtic Feet, The John Rae Collective, Paul Harrison’s acclaimed Sugarworks, a tribute to Martyn Bennett, and scores for film and street dance exploring sampled music.

Myriad Streams features a free access streamable playlist of Bancroft’s music with a variety of line-ups, which changes every few weeks like a magazine or broadcast. The full range of albums are accessible inside the site for subscribers and available for download on Bandcamp. On its release, an album becomes the front-of-house playlist.

As the site develops it will explore non-monetary transactions, including credits for successful sharing, redeemable against subscriptions or downloads. Bancroft aims to build direct relationships with a diverse range of listeners, allowing people of differing finances to support the sustainable creation of music they love. Bancroft’s vision of the future is for a village of Myriad Streams sites, each featuring the music of one artist. He concludes, “Myriad Streams can perhaps be best understood as a piece of functional art, centred around non-commercial music, exploring the triangular relationship between a listener, an artist and that artist’s work and practice.”

See the video below for an interview with Phil Bancroft about the project and to listen to music on Myriad Steams visit www.myriadstreams.com/