Dave Stapleton

Flight

Edition

2012

Dave Stapleton is a multi-tasker of Olympian energy and talent. That is not a new observation, but as the pianist and record company director's outputs increase, it bears repeating. As well as operating the Edition label, which has released 30 albums of immaculately-recorded British and European jazz since he founded it in 2008, Stapleton has maintained his own career as a musician. Flight is his seventh album for the label as leader or co-leader, and is his most ambitious outing to date. It employs a jazz quartet and a string quartet—but is a long way from being a routine with-strings album.

As with most of Stapleton's albums, Flight is as much about his composing and arranging as it is about performance. The writing here conjures a serious atmosphere: sometimes wistful, sometimes somber; sometimes seeming to reach back into memory, at others forward towards resolution, or, perhaps, the unattainable—but always reaching. The melodies are strong and sharply turned; the harmonies tonal but flecked with astringency and flashes of dissonance, at times variously suggesting the chamber music of Antonin Dvorak, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich. To this pleasingly complex ambiance, the jazz soloists add another dimension.

The collective personnel is made up of young lions from across Britain, Europe and Scandinavia. Two are Edition artists in their own right: Danish tenor saxophonist