An Ever Changing View — Matthew Halsall (2023)

A trumpeter packs a box of bells and seeds, goes looking for the sea, and brings back a record that never quite sits still.

By Rafi Mercer

Some records you find by looking for something else.

I came to this one sideways, reading down a list of who had played the Royal Albert Hall in recent years. It was the way you scan the spines in a shop you don't know, half-reading, waiting for a name to snag. A Manchester trumpeter, September 2023. A name I knew from the Gondwana sleeves, not from the red velvet of South Kensington.

That was the first curious thing. The second was the opening.

"Tracing Nature" lasts a minute and eleven seconds. It isn't really a track. It's a threshold, the sound of somewhere outdoors before anyone has picked up an instrument. It misleads you. Taken on its own, it suggests a nature tape, something to drift past on the way to something else.

Then "Water Street" arrives, eight minutes long, and the record tells you what it actually is.

Halsall made it on the move. He took mobile recording gear, his trumpet and a box of handmade and collected percussion: congas, kalimba, clusters of seeds, bells, chimes. He wrote between two places with views of the sea, in North Wales and the North East of England. For the first time he sampled and looped that percussion and built the music on top of it. Field recordings came in. So did short interludes, which he had never used on an album before.

The method changed. The view changed. The title is just an honest account of both.

What stays with you is how much is in here, and how lightly it's carried.

The harp is the first thing you place. It runs back through the Impulse! years to Alice Coltrane's 1971 Satchidananda sessions, where the instrument stopped being decoration and became whole thing. Then come the flute and the hand percussion, and the patience of a groove allowed to run until it becomes a room. That is Pharoah Sanders' Karma territory, the long 1969 prayer that taught a generation of players that time itself could be the subject.

The one I keep coming back to is Lonnie Liston Smith.

Smith played piano on Karma. A few years later he took that sound somewhere gentler. On Expansions in 1975 the Rhodes hangs in the air like warm haze and the rhythm floats rather than drives. You hear that haze all over this record. Halsall draws from the same source twice: Sanders, and the man who softened Sanders' sound.

There's a track here called "Jewels." Sanders' next record after Karma was Jewels of Thought, with Smith at the piano. I can't tell you whether that's a nod. I like that it might be.

Then there's the British side. Years ago his sound was summed up as Kind of Blue meeting The Cinematic Orchestra: modal calm from Miles, layered patience from the Ninja Tune generation. The loops push this record further in that direction than anything he'd made before.

And yet nothing is quoted. The references are absorbed, not borrowed. It sounds like the North of England looking at the horizon, which is exactly what it is.

Then there is the scale of it.

A record built from seeds, bells and a portable recorder on the coast came out on 8 September 2023. It went round the North first: Wylam Brewery in Newcastle, Belgrave Music Hall in Leeds, sold-out nights in Nottingham and Manchester. Thirteen days after release it was at the Royal Albert Hall.

Small sounds, enormous room.

It came out on Gondwana, the label Halsall started himself fifteen years earlier, and the object matches the ambition. Ian Anderson of The Designers Republic made the fonts by hand. The cover is a tapestry commissioned from the artist Sara Kelly. On vinyl, across two records, side one is just "Tracing Nature" and "Water Street." That's where the opening finally makes sense. You lower the needle, the room goes quiet, the outdoors comes in, and then the band. A threshold works better when you've had to cross one to reach it.

Reviewers heard an album that would satisfy the faithful and also reach people who don't think of themselves as jazz listeners. That seems right. It isn't an easy record, only an open one. It closes with "Triangles in the Sky," built from the ring of hand-hammered triangles, the percussion box having the last word.

Some records you find by looking for something else.

This one is about the same thing. You go out to look at the sea. The light shifts. You come back with something you didn't go for.

Quick Questions

Who is Matthew Halsall?

A Manchester trumpeter, composer and producer who founded the independent label Gondwana Records in 2008. His music sits between modal and spiritual jazz, ambient and electronica.

Where should I start with An Ever Changing View?

Start at the beginning, but don't judge it by "Tracing Nature," which is a short field-recording interlude. "Water Street" is where the album really opens.

What should I listen to next?

Lonnie Liston Smith's Expansions (1975) for the same floating Rhodes-and-percussion haze, and Pharoah Sanders' Karma (1969) for where that sound began.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe here, or click here to read more.