by Peter Oxley

Alexander Corlett is a London-based composer and guitarist. He plays with Domenico Johnson in the Corlett & Johnson Guitar Duo, leads the Alex Corlett Quintet and between 2015-2017 was Musical Director for The Big Swing Band.  As a composer he has completed various commissions for Sinfonia Newydd, and written works for classical guitarist Jonathan Parkin and the Morley Big Band amongst others. His compositions have been performed at various venues including the National Museum of Wales, the Dora Stoutzter Hall, St. Teilo’s Church, Caerphilly Castle and the Crypt at St Martin in the Fields. His wind quintet received an excellent performance by the Danish group Ensemble MidtVest during their 2012 visit to the UK.

Before spending four years in Wales, Alex studied jazz guitar for several years with Charles Alexander, and attended master-classes with Mike Outram and Corey Christiansen. In addition to benefitting from private lessons in arranging from the late Eddie Harvey, Alex played in a big band led by veteran arranger Tony Douglas, and in various small groups around London. He has also received tuition from Paul Patterson and Robert Sholl.

In 2015 Alex received a degree from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama where he studied with Robert Spearing. Whilst in Wales the Alex Corlett Sextet performed at leading Cardiff venues including Dempsey’s and Cafe Jazz, and his popular blues and soul band The Hi-Tones played regularly at a variety of events including headlining at the RWCMD Summer Ball two years running.  Alex gives guitar lessons in Richmond, Kingston, Petersham and Teddington.

​

This interview was completed during early February 2018 over Skype.

​

                                                                 ***

​

PO: So Alex what are your earliest experiences of music? How did you start playing?

​

AC: I started playing because I broke my sisters guitar. I was running across the room and she'd left it lying on the sofa, and, I tripped over and fell on top of it and snapped the neck of the body, and I had to glue it back together...and by the time I’d done that I thought I might as well learn how to play it.

​

PO: Ok wow that’s quite a story, what did your early lessons focus on...was there music in your house when you were growing up?

​

AC: Yeah! There was all sorts of music… I used to like dancing around to Little Richard and stuff like that when I was quite small...but in terms of the guitar...

​

PO: When exactly did Jazz enter the frame?

​

AC: Probably when I got to about 18 or something when I was looking for something else to play, something which would be a new challenge.

​

PO: Yeah! It is a new challenge, it’s hard, playing Jazz is hard. I think anyone whose ever tried to pick up an instrument knows that…

​

AC: It doesn’t seem to… I sometimes thought, surely it will get to a point where it’s really easy but, it doesn’t seem to have got to that point yet.

​

PO: I’m sure it has! You’re very good. I suppose Jazz is a bit of a gauntlet.

​

AC: Yes, and it’s not as if it has an army of fans, so playing it can feel like a bit of a

thankless task.

​

PO: How did you get started in composition?

 

AC: The first bit I wrote down was an arrangement for a bunch of Jazz guitars...that got me interested in writing arrangements and then got me interested in composing. And when I went back to do my music A-Level, because I hadn’t done any music A Levels or GCSE’s or anything when I was at school when I went back to do that the composition part of the course was the bit I found the most interesting…and I was kind of intrigued by wondering what the links were between improvising something on an instrument and trying to write something where you’ve got a bit more time to chew over the ideas...because I guess when somebody’s improvising I guess they’re creating ideas sometimes that they can tap into on the spur of the moment.

​

PO: When composing..do you start with improvisation or do you…

​

AC: I think I probably used to more, in terms of messing around to come up with a kind of initial idea…but I think over the course of studying composition at college I started trying to work things out in a more logical way maybe, or getting away from improvising as a means of composing and trying to find within the first piece of material and trying to develop that, rather than having too many unrelated ideas. I’ve tried not to use it so much recently but instead once I’ve got an initial idea, to try and analyse what that little piece of musical material is before keeping up coming up with lots of possibly unrelated ideas.

​

PO: That’s something I really admire if you can really do that well.

​

AC: I think it gets to the point where you think, you know, I might as well save some ideas back for a future piece rather than trying to cram them all into the same piece of music.

​

PO: Do you find a lot of the pieces that you respond well too, that you like, that they sort of have…well first of all what composers do you like? Who would you say your main composition influences are? If you went to a desert island and you could only take three composers with you….who would you take? You’d have a record player and you could listen to all of their works. There’s a piano, there’s a cabin on the island and all the instruments you could want…to demonstrate different things.

 

AC: Ok…..I guess I could have Bach, I could have Stravinsky and Duke Ellington.

​

PO: Why Bach?

​

AC: Probably because he’s the composer whose music sounds the most inevitable I suppose of all composers, his music sounds right all the time, like it has to be that particular way…there are very few composers like that.

​

PO: Yeah ok…and is that one idea being extended out?
 

AC: Well possibly…with Bach you always know someone’s playing the music when they play a wrong note…it has such a kind of internal logic to it….everybody notices if something goes wrong, there’s no masking it.

​

PO: Yeah no…. I suppose that makes the performance very hard really, it makes there no place to hide.

​

AC: No…and it doesn’t make it any better when you start playing it Rubato.

​

PO: Is there a piece which demonstrates Bach's inevitability well to you?

​

AC: Most of his work has a kind of logic and perfection to it that makes it sound satisfying right.  The Brandenburg Concertos, Goldberg Variations, Forty Eight Preludes and Fugues, the Cello Suites, Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins, I still find them all very compelling.

​

PO: Next selection, Stravinsky.

​

AC: Probably because he went through so many stylistic phases, that, through him you could explore everything from neo-classical music to atonal music, he really was a bit of chameleon but had something that remained constant as well throughout his career..

​

PO: The sort of Herbie Hancock of the classical world…

​

AC: Yeah!
 

PO: A chameleon, a literal chameleon. I’ve never thought about that before. And Stravinsky he did it all so well really; liberated rhythm in many ways.

​

AC:… with the rite of spring?

PO: Yes, was that the reason why you chose Stravinsky because of the Rhythmic interest?

​

AC: Yes there’s certainly more rhythmic interest in his music than in the whole Romantic era combined isn’t there.

​

PO: Uh yeah…. there is.

​

AC: I think Constant Lambert said that in his opinion the Romantic period, from a rhythmic standpoint, was unadventurous and limited.

​

PO: And so…do you find things in the romantic era that you might use in your work? Do you take any influence from Romantic composers because with Bach and Stravinsky we’ve got a grandfather figure, or a great grandfather figure…Father Bach.

I used to feel in quite a similar way I used to like either Baroque or Romantic music and dislike Classical… the bit in the middle. Do you feel like that?

​

AC: Well… I like Beethoven a lot and he sort of straddles the line between Romantic and the Classical period… but I find that all of the Romantic composers that followed in Beethoven’s wake…are lacking the profundity which Beethoven has.

​

PO: I don’t think they could possibly match it…

​

AC: So it almost feels like music has to wait for the influence of Beethoven to subside over the course of at least half a century or so before it starts trying to discover new things, which he hadn’t explored.

​

PO: Do you think there’s a similar thing with Bach… there?

​

AC: Bach wasn’t that popular after his death…his sons particularly Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach became much more regarded in their lifetime than he was and he had to….people were always aware of him but he seemed a bit old fashioned by the end of his career… I think it’s a 20th century or even a 21st century thing to attach such importance….to Bach…because immediately following his death, I don’t think he was a huge influence at that time. He was regarded as being a musical conservative.

​

PO: Yes it’s the advocacy of Mendelsshon that lead people to discover Bach.

​

AC: Yes he played a big part in that.

​

PO: Final choice, Duke Ellington?

​

AC: I'd like one of my three composers to be a jazz musician, and since Ellington was rather prolific, there wouldn't be any shortage of music to listen to.  I can't think of any other composer who was able to keep a big band on the road for several decades, whilst also ensuring it was primarily devoted to their own compositions.  No wonder he had those famous pouches under his eyes!  Another advantage to picking Ellington is that I'd also be able to enjoy listening to all of the great players who were featured in the band over the years.

 

PO: Would you take an instrument to the island with you? If so which one?

AC: I'd take the guitar, and a solar powered amp, plus plenty of changes of strings!

​

PO: I was going to ask you of Third Stream music. Your dissertation I believe was on third stream? Is there anything you point to as introductions to Third Stream….what lead you to find out about Third Stream music? Is it something relevant to you?

AC: Well… I think anybody who likes Jazz and who likes Classical music, it’s likely they will be on the lookout as a type of music or a type of musician who wants to find ways of combining the two, because it seems strange if you like two sorts of music to keep them in their separate compartments and not draw on them simultaneously. Gunther was a pioneer in that sphere.

 

PO: I suppose it is pretty inevitable that, if you’re an educated musician, you might have done some Classical training and some Jazz training. Is the legacy continuing strong? Is it hard to find music being performed in this day and age of George Russell and Gunther Schuller?

AC: It’s difficult to say as so many boundaries have become looser anyway..

..many of his early experiments would sound quite dated to contemporary ears..because he was interested in the Jazz musicians of the 50’s and 60’s, and he was also interested in the kind of academic Serialism which was taught in the conservatoires at that time…so neither the Modern Classical music nor the Jazz he was interested in….neither of these sorts of music that he was trying to combine are really performed in the same way nowadays, so his music probably sounds dated by today's standards..but the concept doesn’t cease to be relevant because anyone who wants to incorporate improvisation in a classical composition has to take on board some of his ideas on the matter.

 

PO: What is your reaction to those ideas?

​

AC:  I think Schuller was admirable for the fact that he dared to incorporate jazz musicians into his scores at a time when that was virtually unheard of for a classically trained composer.  His writing about Sonny Rollins' motivic development shows that he believed there were common pursuits in improvising and composing.  He realised that the presence of jazz improvisation in his work would not destroy the logic of the composition, and that it is impossible to compose the subtle nuances found in improvisation.

​

PO: Tell me about your piece Cocaine Nights..

 

AC: Oh yes!

 

PO: If you want to?

 

AC: No sure! That was influenced by third stream music…for it I wanted to find an ensemble that didn’t really already exist so it had a distinctive line up of instruments, so I could create the pungent sound that I wanted. It was designed to be a musical response to JG Ballards novel… and I set out to include elements of improvisation and make them come to the fore in the latter half of the piece and transform the piece in the same way that crime transforms the seaside of Estrella de Mar in JG Ballards books. In a way the improvisation was the equivalent of the subversive element in the novel.

 

PO: Ah very interesting, how does the novel progress? I haven’t read it.

 

AC: So it’s on your reading list?

 

PO: It’s on my ever-growing reading list

I have a copy of Cocaine Nights…I might be able to dig it out now actually…there’s no way I’ll be able to read it in this short space of time.

​

PO (cont.): Did you sort of build-up ideas for that separately to the book or were you reading the book at the time as you were playing with a lot of different compositional ideas?

 

AC: I’d decided I wanted to base the music on a literary work, and that was one that stood out to me, so I reread it, I went through it and underlined all sorts of phrases in the book which conjured up all sorts of ideas to me.

I didn’t want to literally represent any of the events in the book, but more to get across the mood or some of the moods in it whilst also exploring that subversive element in the text.
I had a leitmotif that went through the whole thing, so you could say that’s the romantic influence in there.

​

PO: Do you perceive of a kind of endgame to composition? Is there a theory of everything?

AC: I don't think in terms of there being any kind of ultimate goal.  Composition should be about trying to communicate something unique and personal, not trying to carry any kind of theory to the nth degree.  There cannot be a theory of everything.  Composition is neither more nor less intrinsically meaningful than any other form of human endeavour.

 

PO: There are many excellent musicians out there that are being extremely neglected by the music industry. What advice would you have to those in that position?

 

AC: Um… I think if I had any great advice to them I’d want to give it to myself first! I don’t know what to suggest, it seems so difficult now with so many people wanting to do something interesting, but at the same time the cost of housing being so high, it means if people want to spend hours doing something creative they’re almost persuaded not to do it by economic factors, especially if they’re living in or around London. How could they possibly have time to dedicate to writing a half hour piece music which is going to take hours and hours of preparation if they’ve got to be earning enough money to keep going?

 

PO: It’s the economics of it.

​

AC: I think the current situation and the housing crisis and all this sort of business creates a really problematic environment for anyone who wants to pursue something creative, particularly when they’re no longer part of an academic institution and they’re on their own and they haven’t any safety net, they have to find themselves some kind of work whatever that might be and then it’s hard to keep the interest going in the face of what seems like a very indifferent world.

 

PO: Wow that’s really one to make you stop and feel wow it’s tremendously depressing.

 

AC: I don’t want to be on too much of a downer about things but it’s only true that a lot of 20th century British composers like Benjamin Britten and William Walton and Vaughan Williams, they all had money behind them which gave them the luxury and the time to be able to devote themselves to, to composition. If they hadn’t had either of those things, they would have had to have done something else.

 

PO: Yes they’d have to have done all manner of other things. I suppose you’ve got the patronage system.

 

AC: So…people nowadays need to seduce a wealthy patron!

​

PO: What’s your opinion on Kickstarter and Crowdfunding pages where people ask for donations; help me raise £1000 for a new iPhone 6, do you think they are good things for society?      

 

AC: My only answer is that if you start to ask for money for some initiative of yours, you’re then competing with a lot of very worthy causes in the world, there a lot of other potentially very more worthy causes out there.

​

PO: It’s certainly hard work to get people to part with hard earned…well it should be hard.

 

AC: Hmm…they’re probably thinking to themselves I could give the money to this or if I’m going to give away money maybe I should give it to some starving people on the other side of the world or people that perhaps need it more than this very worthy sounding compositional project.

​

PO: Next question. Pete Churchill at the Royal Academy has pointed to differences in how harmony is used pragmatically in improvisation and idealistically in composition. Do you draw a similar distinction?

 

AC: Well I think in Jazz its helpful if chords can be labelled because then you can think of what your going to play over them….you couldn’t exactly get much together with people from a chord chart which just had a lot of question marks in boxes and people didn’t have anything to go by..but if people aren’t improvising and your writing a piece of music out in full…you can think much more in terms of just what the intervals are which comprise the chord and not necessarily..it doesn’t have to function in a tonal way which helps people to improvise over it.

​

PO: I’m just thinking of someone turning up with a score full of question marks and expecting the performers to translate it into sound really…

 

AC: You can do that as a little project..

 

PO: So you have a duo life Alex, like Keith Jarrett who doubles as a performer and a composer. Who are you listening to at the moment?

​

AC: I think the last pieces of classical music I listened to, I listened to some of Sibelius’ symphonies but never really got into those in the past…and I’d read about some of the structural elements of his symphonies so I dug some of those out…what’s that piece by Stravinsky, the Apollo piece for strings.

 

PO: I was going to say the Firebird?

​

AC: Oh yes that was his earliest ballet wasn’t it!

​

PO: Ok that sounds great. Have you been getting scores out?

 

AC: I haven’t no I’ve just been reading the points made in this book 'Talking About Symphonies' and then just trying to listen out for them and sometimes hearing somebody else views on a piece and they do include little snippets of the score as reductions in the text, it can make you hear things that you might, I don’t know, overlook otherwise and hear them in a structural way and its quite nice not to be looking at the whole score where you hear all the details but instead just to be doodling and trying to spot this key idea which has been talked about, and then when you hear it it really stands out and you hopefully hear how it affects other things in the music as well.

 

PO: …it affects how you hear other things in the music?

 

AC: It’s nice to have somebody’s idea of what the pivotal bits of the piece are and then you and see if you agree with them when you listen to it.

 

PO: Are you using specific books?

​

AC: This one was by a guy who used to present a BBC Radio 3 programme, called Anthony Hopkins but not the same one as the actor.. and his book talking about symphonies is a good book for people who are trying to get into that kind of long scale composition…the way he talks about sonata form for the first movement, describing it in relation to a house and describing keys and their in relationship to eachother as if they were laid out like a housing estate, makes it easy for people to visualise...

 

PO: I see.

​

AC: So then people really get an idea of which keys are their next door neighbours or which ones they’ve got to trek to the other side of the square to visit.

 

PO: Or get on the train to visit.

​

AC: Yes!

 

PO: Do you use allegories or metaphor in your teaching? Do you do things like that?

​

AC: If I do, I don’t remember having done it. I don’t set out to deliberately, and if I’m teaching children I’m probably hoping that I’m not being too cryptic.

​

​

***

Interview length= 62 minutes

​

**I later chose to clarify certain things via email with Alex**

 

Tags:

 

Alex Corlett, Jazz, Bach, Stravinsky, Duke Ellington, Herbie Hancock, Constant Lambert, Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach, George Russell, Gunther Schiller, Cocaine Nights, Britten,Vaughan Williams, William Walton

​

​

​

​

​

​