Tim Garland: Weather Walker
Edition Records
Weather Walker isn't the only ambitious project Tim Garland has tackled. In 2014 the lauded saxophonist/composer released the double album Songs to the North Sky, whose first disc featured him collaborating with the Royal Northern Sinfonia, bassist John Patitucci, and percussionist Asaf Sirkis. As monumental in scope is the hour-long orchestral opus Weather Walker, which sees him drawing for inspiration from the Lake District in the north-west of England and working with pianists Pablo Held and Jason Rebello, double bassist Yuri Goloubev, an eight-piece string ensemble, and a thirty-five-piece string orchestra. Such epic resources enable Garland, also known as Chick Corea's regular saxophonist, to evoke the majestic sweep of the landscape, yet the album also includes solo passages of an intimate kind that suggest the stillness one might experience within the setting itself.
Recorded at Abbey Road Studio 1, the recording features Garland conducting and playing tenor and soprano saxophones on an album that achieves a satisfying balance between composition and improvisation. Given the recording's direct connection to his home country, it's only natural that a nostalgic quality would be present, but when material draws so heavily from a visual setting other dimensions naturally come into play, too, among them cinematic and pastoral. The latter aspect can be heard in the inclusion of thematic material taken from the northern English folk song “The Snows They Melt the Soonest,” which Garland used as a springboard to generate other material, and in track titles that suggest nature regarded by human eyes with humble reverence.
Ranging widely in mood, the twelve compositions alternate between the dynamic and the delicate. In pairing agitated strings with Garland's soaring soprano and Rebello's piano, the dramatic opener “Rugged Land” instates the album's anthemic pitch from the outset, whereas the awe felt by the human subject in the face of nature's majesty is suitably conveyed by “The Sky is an Empty Mirror” and the string orchestra-only “Altitude.” “The Snows” illustrates how effectively Garland weds composition and improvisation on the project, with in this instance ample soloing for the leader's tenor and Rebello's piano countered by the formal scoring of the strings.
German pianist Pablo Held proves a splendid foil for Garland's soprano on “The Lady in the North” and “Black Crag,” with the duo's close interactions making it seem like they've been performing together for years. A similar impression is left by the title track when Rebello pairs with the leader for some of the set's most jazz-inflected playing. No mention of the release would be complete without mentioning the fine playing of Goloubev, whose solos on “The Sky is an Empty Mirror” and “Magic Box” are two memorable turns of many.
There are times when Weather Walker calls to mind similarly ambitious projects by Jan Garbarek and Terje Rypdal that pair the artists with large-scale assemblages of musicians, and there also are a few moments where the distance separating Garland from Garbarek seems small (“Angry Sun,” for example). No one, however, should mistake Garland for a clone of Garbarek or anyone else, for that matter; it's more a matter of kindred sensibilities than anything else. Regardless, Weather Walker impresses on multiple grounds, from its elegant compositions and arrangements to its heartfelt performances. Epic in reach but epic in accomplishment, too.August 2018