Asha Parkinson
Possession
by Howard Lawes
The Swanage Jazz Festival has a reputation for being a showcase for the best of British jazz and 2024 was no exception being blessed with great weather and great bands. The line-up included three young female tenor saxophonists who are all exceptional but intriguingly have embarked on strikingly different career paths within the jazz envelope. Alex Clarke was playing as part of the TJ Johnson Band, performing a selection of popular jazz, blues and soul music, Emma Rawicz led both her quintet playing colourful, contemporary jazz from her recent album and a large jazz orchestra while Asha Parkinson led her Kalpadruma quintet performing reduced versions of tracks from her soon to be released album Possession, that fuses jazz, classical and world music. As an aside all three women have reached the final stages of the BBC Young Jazz Musician Competition but none have won it.
Of the three, Asha's choices are perhaps the most courageous. She is both an excellent improviser as well as a very accomplished composer and arranger of jazz, classical and vocal music and her new album demonstrates her mastery of these skills. Possession is due to be released on Ubuntu Records on 20th September and talking with Asha via Zoom she described some of her recent activities before discussing Possession in more detail. (Details about her earlier life and career are described in a previous article here ).
In 2017 Asha created a project called 'Voices Beyond Division' that brought together children from Christian, Jewish and Moslem schools. Asha worked with the children and composed the music for them to sing together at a concert in London. The hope was that encouraging children from different backgrounds to create music together would promote greater understanding between cultures reducing the risk of conflict.
Asha continues to believe that music is a force for good in the world and is currently involved in a project with the organisation 'Rosetta Life'. Together with Syrian composer Marwan Nakhleh, she is creating the music to accompany a young leaders' project that will be presented at a Climate Change conference in New York. Composition for small and medium ensembles together with arranging and orchestration is a large part of Asha's work. She has led composition workshops at Cambridge University, and is preparing a newly commissioned piece for an ensemble at Oxford University for her Master of Studies in Music (Composition) degree. Other commissions include original music for students performing exhibition pieces on graduation from their conservatoires and she also composes and arranges all the words and music for her band, Kalpadruma.
Asha has continued to perform with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra and with Kalpadruma during the past few months and has performed several gigs in London. She has also been part of the Sam Eastmond Band for his project, John Zorn's Bagatelles Vol 16 which was performed at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival. At the Swanage Jazz Festival, playing music from Possession, she had the misfortune to be scheduled to perform at the same time as England was losing to Spain in the UEFA Championship. Ironically, festival goers had become possessed by the need to watch football on television.
To realise the Possession album, Asha brought together a small orchestra comprised of her jazz quintet, string quartet and voice plus qanun, flutes, reeds and trumpet. The quintet is Asha Parkinson (saxophones), Charlie Heywood (guitar), Alex Wilson (piano), Hamish Nockles-Moore (bass) and Alex Taylor (drums). The string quartet is Abbie Davis and Chloe Meade (violin), Andrew Liddell (viola), and Cubby Howard (cello). Vocals are from Rebecka Edlund and the remaining musicians are Meera Maharaj (flute), Simeon May (baritone saxophone/bass clarinet), Christie Smith (trumpet), Konstantinos Glynos (qanun) with Gareth Lockrane (flute/alto flute) guesting on tracks 2 and 3. Some of the musicians Asha has known for a long time. Gareth Lockrane was one of her tutors at the Guildhall School of Music while Asha met Konstatinos Glynos, whose qanun brings a unique timbre to the ensemble, during her Jazz South commissioned 'Encounters' project in 2021. Asha formed Kalpadruma in 2017 and guitarist Charlie Heywood is a founding member. Bass player Hamish Nockles-Moore, drummer Alex Taylor and Rebecka Edlund are recent additions and Rebecka’s distinctive voice has brought a new dimension to the band. The other players in the ensemble are all skilled readers and need to understand contemporary classical harmony while being equally at home playing jazz. Inevitably, a large ensemble inhibits the interplay between musicians that could occur in a small jazz band who are well-known to each other but as in classical music, the beauty comes from the composition.
Here is the title track:
The theme of the album is possession, in its various forms. These forms are exemplified in the title track and other key tracks such as Urban Fantasy reflecting the manic energy of city life, Distant Devotion, a poignant portrayal in song and music of a lover, remote from their loved one, and Mirror Image is inspired by Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, a story of conflict between human desires and societal roles. Asha says the songs are about those inner gods or feelings that can dominate the mind of human beings such as self, anger, and spiritual and romantic love. Composers derive inspiration from many sources, and for Asha literature, folklore and spirituality are rich sources of material that fire her imagination. She reads widely and has a particular interest In the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Rumi. The track Possession is inspired by a Czechoslovak folk tale while the track Avvon D'Bishmaiya is a version of the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic, a language that originated in Syria and spread throughout the Middle East. Asha is not alone among jazz composers in using spirituality for inspiration, John Coltrane (A Love Supreme, 1965) and Pharoah Saunders (Karma, 1969) were pioneers in the style while more recently Shabaka and the Ancestors (Wisdom of Elders, 2016) and Maisha (There is a Place, 2019) have continued the theme. Asha mentions John Taverner and Arlo Part as composers who have influenced her. The last track on the album, Permanent Verse, deals with discrimination and includes words spoken by the Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, reminiscent of the work of Gil Scott-Heron..
Here is a video with extracts from Possession when Asha and Kalpadruma played at Ronnie Scott's club in November last year:
Asha's music is a blend of jazz, classical and folkloric music from Europe and Asia and it is also for the most part composed, with less improvisation and solos than is usual for a jazz album. Previous examples that combine jazz and classical music have been labelled 'Chamber Jazz' or 'Third Stream'. One example, in its centenary year, is George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue but a more recent example is Focus (1962) composed by Stan Getz and arranged by Eddie Sauter, recently performed at the Royal Festival Hall by Nubya Garcia with the Nu Civilisation Orchestra. Further variations on the jazz / classical theme include works by the Kronos Quartet and Jan Garbarek' whose Officium (1993) album is the largest-selling album on the ECM label. Many composers employ others to do the arranging and orchestration but Asha, who received an award from Help Musicians, does everything herself (with a little help from Alex Taylor on the drum parts) and makes full use of the opportunities that a larger ensemble provides. Any artist whose work diverges from the mainstream is likely to be apprehensive about how their work will be received by the public but Asha's intricate music is gorgeous and music fans with a sense of adventure will find it hugely enjoyable.
Possession is released on Ubuntu records on 20th September with an album launch at Toulouse Lautrec, 140 Newington Butts, London SE11 4RN on 27th September. Asha's website is here.
