Matthew Halsall's "Mountains, Trees and Seas" is a sonic landscape painting

Matthew Halsall has never seen himself as part of any one sound or scene: he builds his own sonic universe instead. Over the course of 15 years and eight albums, he’s become a vital voice in instrumental music, with his lithe and limitless blends of jazz, electronica, global and spiritual jazz influences. By now, his style is unmistakable: a certain lightness of touch; a warm glow; waves that lap and birds that sing; it’s deeply meditative music, in tune with nature, that nourishes as much as it galvanises. But his new and ninth album An Ever Changing View is a subtle step up for the Manchester-based trumpeter, bandleader and composer – and an apt title for an artist who evolves with every new release. Halsall is at his most experimental yet, expanding his sound and production techniques once more.

2020’s Salute To The Sun was already a gear shift: after two albums with the Gondwana Orchestra (2014’s When The World Was One and 2015’s Into Forever), Halsall debuted a new band of young musicians from his home city. Salute To The Sun’s earthy soulful music landed like a balm during a tempestuous time, earning scores of new admirers who’d never before seen themselves as jazz fans. Halsall could relate: “I’ve always been on the edge of jazz,” he says. “I felt like a bit of an outsider.” On An Ever Changing View, though, he has leaned into another artform he was excited by during his formative years in Manchester, the sample culture of late-90s and early-2000s, where producers like The Cinematic Orchestra, Bonobo and Mr. Scruff deftly wove jazz samples throughout their work.

The album’s opener ‘Tracing Nature’ sets the scene, with its lush, pastoral wash of shimmering sounds and birdsong, as if gazing up to the sky through the forest canopy. During its creation, Halsall was staying in both a beautiful architect’s house with breathtaking sea views in north Wales and a striking modernist house in Bridlington, in the northeast of England, and he composed what he saw “like a landscape painting”. The latter location was the starting point for the album, with its vast windows that looked out onto the North Sea’s picturesque coastline, as opposed to his usual inner-city home studio, where Salute To The Sun was composed and recorded. In this new environment, Halsall wanted to capture “the feeling of openness and escapism” he felt being there and to approach making music again from scratch. “I hit the reset button and wanted to have complete musical freedom,” he says. “It was a real exploration of sound.”

Another starting point was his ever-expanding box of percussion, from congas and kalimba to various clusters of seeds, bells and chimes, which he’d been collecting over the past two years. Many of these instruments are custom-made and don’t exist anywhere else in the world, such as one mobile made of 18 hand hammered triangles, each individually tuned, which guided the track ‘Triangles In The Sky’. Another is a mobile made of keys, and one of bottle tops. For Halsall, it was about trying to get in touch with a childhood playfulness. He recalls a favourite Picasso quote:  “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

Halsall started to create his own samples from this percussive treasure trove, looping them to use as a foundation for the songs – a first for him and his band. ‘Water Street’, for example, gets richer with every listen, as spirals of kalimba, glockenspiel and other percussion sparkle underneath a gently bouncy 4x4 beat. In the studio, he says he “would almost be like a DJ at points, bringing different elements in and out for people to play on top of. It was a new and fun way of working, and everyone beautifully adapted to that process.”

Halsall also saw a link with another area of great interest: “Looped samples have a meditative quality that I look for in a lot of music,” he says, having studied Transcendental Meditation at the Maharishi Free School in West Lancashire in his teens. “Music is so vital to our mental and spiritual health,” he continues. “Music can elevate and inspire us, or soothe and protect us. It’s a quality that I hear in spiritual jazz, ambient music or just in the sound of the sea and the wind in the trees. I wanted that quality to be part of the tapestry I created for this album.”

It was hearing jazz on the dancefloor as a teenager that first opened up new possibilities in Halsall’s mind. He’d been playing trumpet since the age of six and in various big bands, but a switch flipped when he snuck out to a club and witnessed eclectic selector Mr. Scruff play out Pharoah Sanders’ ‘You’ve Got To Have Freedom’. “I got obsessed by the exploding DJ culture that was happening at that time,” he remembers, “as well as Alice Coltrane and spiritual jazz records. I started listening to Mr Scruff and Gilles Peterson mixes all the time. I thought: this is what I want to do, something influenced by the past but in a contemporary, present form.”

An Ever Changing View melds those forms in a way that feels heady and, at times, even otherworldly. The album’s title track evolves and unfolds as it echoes the tide coming in and out; ‘Calder Shapes’ is an elevating, charming and totally modern jazz track with restless percussion evoking a warm magic realism; then there’s the laid back groove of ‘Mountains, Trees and Seas’, where hand percussion, deep bass and the gorgeous glisten of the Fender Rhodes meet a hip-hop beat.

‘Jewels’ is another about-turn, in which samples shuffle and twist together to make a living, breathing, organic piece of dance music. Elsewhere, the gleefully relentless ‘Natural Movement’ is a true spirit-lifter with its pacy, interlocking loops of Log Drum and xylophone and some elegiac playing from Halsall. Tracks like ‘Sunlight Reflection’ and ‘Field Of Vision’ offer further moments of pause, the former with its chiming triangles and lambent harp like sunbeams through a window; the latter, another sonic daydream of rippling piano and birdsong from Anglesey Island.

An Ever Changing View ends with the beautiful ‘Triangles in the Sky’, an entrancing, hypnotic track that deftly works wordless vocals into a final shifting tapestry of sound, underpinned by a skittering drum beat and featuring Halsall’s long-time collaborator Chip Wickham on flute. It closes an album that marks Halsall out not just as a trumpet virtuoso, composer and bandleader but as a gifted producer, who is able to draw out the expressive from the complex. No doubt it will sound absolutely mammoth in London’s Royal Albert Hall come September, the biggest show Halsall has played yet.

The album’s artwork, meanwhile, perfectly complements Halsall’s vision. It’s a vibrant abstract hanging dotted with colourful, organic forms, designed and woven by London-based artist Sara Kelly, which Halsall commissioned especially for the album. After all, he’s an artist who is constantly shapeshifting too, and forever weaving new worlds. ~ Kate Hutchinson, London, May 2023