Tim Garland - Into The Strorm

Simplicity is key, he tells Robert Shore

“I started as a composer and went to the Guildhall, so I was studying score writing and composition,” recounts Tim Garland, leading light in a variety of acclaimed outfits and projects (Acoustic Triangle, The Lighthouse Trio) as well as sideman to the stars (Chick Corea, Bill Bruford). “But then halfway through that course I got impatient with writing everything down. I’d experimented with the saxophone as a teenager and one day I woke up and realised that’s what I had to do. So I blew my grant on buying a saxophone and a year and a half later I was playing with Ronnie Scott, actually in the club!” And that, in very compressed form, is how, a couple of decades later, Garland finds himself not only one of the UK’s foremost composers but also one of its most indemand improvising musicians.

Garland recently settled in the northeast after taking up a three-year post as composer-in-residence at Newcastle University, and now commutes between the family home in Whitley Bay and his metropolitan base in Wembley. He finds the comparative isolation of Whitley Bay – “you can hear the sound of the seagulls and the foghorns of the boats and smell the sea air” – inspirational for his work as a composer, but he makes no bones about his love of the capital: “The more I’m up there, the more of a Londoner I feel!”

This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #151 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE CD...