Montauk Variations

The spirit of improvisation has been as central to Bourne’s career as his reinvention of English pastoral. A restless, endlessly exploratory musician, Bourne first came to prominence at the age of 23 when he won the Perrier Jazz Award in 2001, following that with a BBC Jazz Award for Innovation the next year. He has spent the ensuing decade working in a bewildering variety of contexts, from the manic structures and free flights of his trio with bassist Dave Kane and percussionist Steven Davis as Bourne/Davis/Kane (one of the few genuinely innovative piano trios of a period when ‘innovative’ pianos trios have been as common as crows), to the fluid, contemporary sound of The Electric Dr M, to free playing with Tony Bevan, Barre Phillips, Tony Buck and others, and even forays into the strange and marginal world of broken and neglected pianos (2009’s superb Songs From A Lost Piano project).

With Montauk Variations, Bourne has reinvented his approach by stripping away the clutter and quirkiness characteristic of previous work. Fragility and romanticism have now become key focal elements in highly personal performances that still carry the Bourne hallmarks of unpredictability and elliptical intensity. This is the first of a series of album projects to be released through a new partnership with The Leaf Label, displaying a melodic lyricism that is quite unexpected - it even closes with a plaintive version of Charlie Chaplin’s much-covered ‘Smile’ (from the 1936 movie Modern Times). Future releases under the ‘Matthew Bourne Presents’ banner will include an audio-visual project recorded with his beloved Memorymoog analogue synthesizer, and an album with vocalist Seaming To under the name Billy Moon, which you can expect to hear in the next 18 months or so.