Halsall has never seen himself as part of any one sound or scene: he builds his own sonic universe instead. An Ever Changing View finds him at his most experimental yet, once again expanding his sound and production techniques to create his unique brand of deeply meditative music. During its creation, he 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”. In these new environments, Halsall wanted to capture “the feeling of openness and escapism” 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.”
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.
One of the album’s starting points was Halsall’s ever-expanding box of percussion, from congas and kalimba to various clusters of seeds, bells and chimes, which he sampled and looped 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.”
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.
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