Bill Laurance goes solo to find the point where groove and melody collide

Bill Laurance has taken a break from jazz heroes Snarky Puppy to work on some incredible solo

I’ve been hugely inspired by the success of Snarky and watching it grow and watching how universal the hunger is for live, instrumental, improvised music.

BILL Laurance’s third album, Aftersun, was saved by Miles Davis. The British pianist, and founder member of Snarky Puppy, tells of a crisis of confidence in the days before the recording session.

“I had written about 50% of the album,” he says, “and I just felt like I didn’t have enough material, basically, to warrant going in. I discussed this with Mike League from Snarky Puppy and we agreed that we should postpone the session. So I called everyone and cancelled the band, the film crew, the studio.

“Then I went to bed and I couldn’t sleep that night and I watched a documentary about the making of Kind of Blue. It’s an amazing documentary that looks into how that album was conceived and the whole point about it was capturing spontaneity, and how the magic only happens if you allow freedom, and you go into the recording session not over prepared.”

Thus inspired, Laurance quickly made some calls, and was soon in a New Orleans studio with League and fellow Snarky collaborator Robert ‘Sput’ Searight on drums. The result, he says, is “a much more organic album. A lot of what is on the record was composed there and then, or improvised there and then.”

There’s a lot of groove on Aftersun, in numbers like ‘A Blaze’, or ‘SOTI’; but elsewhere, on tracks like ‘Golden Hour’ or ‘The Pines’, Laurance’s melodic piano comes to the fore. “I’m always trying to keep as much variation as possible,” says Laurance, “and to reference as many genres as possible, which I think partly is due to the organic approach on this record. I wanted to get back to a groove element, and different elements of that, whether it’s African percussion, or like more of a straight-ahead jazz thing, or kind of a jazz-rock vibe.”

The trio were joined in the New Orleans studio by Weedie Braimah, the percussionist. His presence is a good indicator of this album’s rhythmic, percussive heart.

“I’d certainly say I’ve moved away from the strings,” says Laurance, whose previous albums have been marked by a cinematic quality that is typical of him, a self-described “visually inspired” musician. “I’ve come back to the trio, basically. I wanted to focus more on my instinct as an instrumentalist, which is really kind of as a percussionist, almost. I see the piano almost as part of percussion section before I see it anywhere else. So I wanted to come back to that, and alongside Mike League and Robert, we were lucky enough to get Weedie. He’s a remarkable musician and a huge personality who gave the record the lift we needed.”

Laurance and Mike League go back 12 years, when they played gigs together as university students and formed Snarky Puppy. Now, the group is more a rolling tag-team collective of almost 40 musicians. “We were just another college band, basically,” Laurance recalls. “It was creativity born of necessity really and when members started getting other gigs we’d find other people who could play the part. So now we have four or five members who can cover each instrument. We’re in rotation all the time. It’s a very humble group of musicians. There’s no egos, we’re all very open and giving, I think, which lends itself to a functioning collective like that.

“It’s just something we’ve stuck at. I think it’s a testament to what’s possible. I’ve been hugely inspired by the success of Snarky and watching it grow and watching how universal the hunger is for live, instrumental, improvised music. It’s quite remarkable to me, really. I do feel like ultimately, though, you have to focus on your own thing, and that’s what I’m doing now.”

Keeping in that vein, Laurance has assembled a new line-up for his current tour. “We have Chris Hyson on the upright bass, this amazing young percussionist called Felix Higginbottom, and then this amazing drummer, Richard Spaven. He’s one of the top UK drummers around. The album is taking on a whole new lease of life with this ensemble and I plan to get into the studio with them at a later date. But for sure, with Mike and Sput I wanted to get this trilogy of albums done, and I’ve always loved working with them.”

The Bill Laurance Quartet plays the Sugar Club, Dublin, tonight. Tickets €20. Aftersun is out now on GroundUp Music.