Bloom

Bill Laurance & Michael League - Keeping Company CD / Vinyl / digital Bill Laurance piano Michael League oud, fretless bass, vocals “For us to take a common project and drive it forwards together is an affirmation of who we are: we're just good friends and we're celebrating that with this album.” Bill Laurance There are some duos which can seem as if they have been patched together. And there are others which come into being naturally and completely of their own accord. The pairing of pianist Bill Laurance and bassist/oud player Michael League is very much one of the latter; the two musicians have known each other since student days. During a chance meeting in Leeds, England, as sidemen on a one-off project, the two quickly formed a musical bond that would grow through the formation of Snarky Puppy in 2004 and its development over years of touring together, a number of solo albums and collaborations, and finally, in 2020, the birth of their duo. Bill Laurance and Michael League’s new duo album, “Keeping Company,” is at the opposite end of the spectrum from all the extraversion, large scale and sheer oomph of Snarky Puppy; the focus here is on a shared inner perspective. That much is apparent immediately from the choice of instruments. Laurance has cast aside electronic keyboards and concentrates on piano, acoustic in sound although the piano strings have been occasionally and lightly prepared. Michael League chooses a fretless acoustic bass guitar and the oud. An extreme contrast to the pure groove of Snarky Puppy, here he goes for a transparently sparse but atmospherically rich sound. They do just fine without the band, creating a special freedom for both participants. “The oud in itself has a specific associative space,” says Bill Laurance from the orchestral perspective of the piano. “When I compose, my aim is to transport the listener. That works with the sound of the oud. It's not a guitar, it has something exotic about it. It's a canvas on which you can paint a lot of things. On the first album, we discussed whether Michael should play a fretless nylon string guitar. He tried it out, but it didn't produce the same emotion as the oud. Due to the oud being fretless, it can access a whole new world of expression and created new colours for the duo. That fascinated us.” Their curiosity is undimmed. “Keeping Company” is the duo's second album after the internationally acclaimed “Where You Wish You Were,” released in January 2023. The preparation phase was extremely productive. Both musicians wrote numerous sketches and compositions, with Bill Laurance alone writing up to three ideas a day for weeks on end. Finally, the abundance of new material had to be whittled down. “The first album was more about establishing a sound and exploring the dynamics. Now we want to delve deeper. There's even more personality in the music. We also wanted to try out things we hadn't explored before in this format, a touch of soul jazz, for example. We also made it a priority to record practically everything live, without unnecessary overdubbing. We have found a particular beauty in concentrating on what happens organically without too much extraneous thought or effort. The whole idea of broadening horizons by taking excursions into the unknown is second nature in this partnership. Michael League, for example, has never formally studied the oud in a classical context. He knows the instrument largely from his brother, who studied it while living in Greece in the early 2000s, and is mentored by Ara Dinkjian, one of the world’s most respected masters of the instrument. But he himself has explored the short-necked lute largely from his own perspective (as encouraged to do so by Dinkjian) and therefore ornaments differently, intuitively, and with a unique accent. Bill Laurance, on the other hand, dispenses with the expansive and grand-standing aspects of the piano. He prefers cantabile melodies, rhythmically clever, clear accompaniments, and compact improvisations. The pieces themselves seem like miniatures- hints at ideas rather than final or definitive statements. And that, as a duo still making discoveries, is all that they need to do here. “Keeping Company” is a snapshot of an unusual team, catching moments like a collection of Polaroids in sound. Bill Laurance and Michael League are still in the wonderfully inspiring phase of joint exploration. Everything is open. The music sounds spontaneous and intuitive. It has the power of the personal and builds on a friendship in which shared humour is a part of what happens naturally. Perhaps one day other players will join in. But for the time being, this intimate musical dialogue is the ideal form of artistic conversation for Bill Laurance and Michael League.Credits: Produced by Bill Laurance, Michael League & Nic Hard

The famous compliation "Magic Moments", curated by Siggi LochTracklist: 01 Elevation of Love // Album: e.s.t. 30 Magnus Öström, Dan Berglund, Magnus Lindgren, Joel Lyssarides, Verneri Pohjola, Ulf Wakenius 02 Second Nature // Album: Life Rhythm Wolfgang Haffner03 Raw // Album: raw Nils Landgren Funk Unit 04 The Answer // Album: The Answer Jakob Manz 05 Shots // Album: Bloom Bill Laurance 06 Das Handtuch // Album: Tough Stuff Iiro Rantala 07 She’ll Arrive Between 10 & 11 // Album: Guitar PoetryMikael Máni 08 Terrible Seeds // Album: While You Wait Little North 09 Se Telefonando // Album: Ennio Grégoire Maret, Romain Collin 10 Wonderland // Album: Wonderland Daniel García Trio 11 Fresu // Album: Inner Spirits Jan Lundgren, Yamandu Costa 12 Hands Off // Album: Stealing Moments Viktoria Tolstoy 13 Hidden Prelude // Album: What the Fugue Florian Willeitner 14 Pralin // Album: Let Them Cook Emile Parisien 15 My Brother Rolf // Album: Komeda Joachim Kühn 16 Passacaglia // Album: Passacaglia Adam Bałdych, Leszek Możdżer 17 Linden Tree Rag // Album: Rag Bag Bernd Lhotzky 18 Zafeirious Solo // Album: Arcs & Rivers Joel Lyssarides, Georgios Prokopiou

Bill Laurance & The Untold Orchestra - BloomCD / Vinyl / digital Bill Laurance piano, fender rhodes mk8, osmose expressive, prophet 6 Rory Storm conductor The Untold Orchestra A series of dark, warm string chords opens the curtain on a vista of spaciousness and great sonic depth.Soon after, an intense rhythm develops, classically light and tightly grooving at the same time. A crystalline piano melody develops over everything, leading into an imaginative, hypnotically intensifying improvisation.Bloom sees 5-time Grammy-winning composer and pianist Bill Laurance once more expanding his sonic palette. He has returned to his classical roots, working with arranger Josh Poole and 18 string players from Manchester’s Untold Orchestra to produce an album on a convincingly epic scale. Conceptually, Laurance says the record was largely inspired by his child’s capacity to imagine and create other worlds: “Every decision we take can be traced back to our capacity to imagine, the only limits on what we can achieve are the scale of our dreams. My child’s ability to pull back the curtain of reality and to create a fantasy world ignited all kinds of possibilities for me, and that is what ultimately led to this music.” Combining Laurance’s classical sensibilities with jazz, pop grooves, and powerful orchestral synchronicity, Bloom runs the gamut of emotions and moods. Whether it’s flowing dreamscapes or dramatic crescendos, listeners are taken to exactly where they want to be, without ever veering off into the predictable.

Bill Laurance & Michael League - Where You Wish You WereCD / Vinyl / digital Bill Laurance acoustic piano and voice Michael League oud, fretless acoustic guitar bass, fret-less baritone electric guitar, ngoni and voice A mere mention of the names of Michael League and Bill Laurance makes one think of Snarky Puppy. It is now nearly twenty years since Southern California-born bassist/multi-instrumentalist Michael League founded the globally acclaimed, four-time GRAMMY award-winning collective. As for keyboardist Bill Laurance, originally from London, he has been a part of the globe-trotting adventure for nearly as long as League has. So the fact that League and Laurance are now releasing "Where you Wish you Were", their first duo album together, does feel at the same time like a logical development...and also a surprise. Michael League takes a very different role here from the one he does in Snarky Puppy. On "Where you Wish you Were", he is to be heard mainly playing the oud and other acoustic stringed instruments. He takes the view that “we are so much more than the roles we play in the most popular band that we're a part of.” And Bill Laurance adds: "It was only a matter of time before we'd make a record by ourselves. We've been close friends for 20 years now and we've worked together in so many different capacities - with Snarky Puppy, my own band, and in collaboration with other artists. So it just felt like it was a natural thing to do." Laurance and League became completely taken by the idea of doing something totally different from Snarky Puppy, which is a project on such a large scale, it recently filled London's 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena. The pair kept the idea in mind to reduce the music down to a scale where it could be played by their duo. The recording offered a long-awaited opportunity to explore the intimacy, fragility and clarity which exist within the relationship between two musicians; it was something which they were both keen to achieve. "I think both Michael and I are driven by the idea to push boundaries, which is important. But this album is different," Laurance recalls. “Every single compositional idea has a lot of weight to it, and everything has very specific purpose. There was no rhythm section to hide behind, it was really just about melody and chords. And we were instinctively trying to create a place where people want to go to, that felt comforting. We feel that now, maybe more than ever, there is a need for such places.” What is particularly surprising, apart from the duo format with its reduced, concentrated approach, is the particular sonic and stylistic character of the music. Bill Laurance, who with his own projects and also with Snarky Puppy, often relies on a mixture of piano and a variety of synthesizers, orchestral arrangements and digital soundscapes, focuses here entirely on the possibilities of an acoustic grand piano, which has been ‘prepared’ with extra felt to dampen the strings. And Michael League, known elsewhere primarily as an electric bassist fired up by jazz and groove, plays a number of mostly fretless stringed instruments of Mediterranean and Oriental origin here – first and foremost the oud, but also a specially constructed acoustic and electric guitar and a West African lute, the ngoni. All these instruments have the quality of being able to imitate the voice, and also offer microtonal possibilities which go way beyond the norms of western music. These kinds of musical influences have accompanied Michael League since his childhood, and particularly now because his adopted home country, Spain is part of the Mediterranean region: “My family is of Greek ancestry and my brother specializes in Greek folk music, so my first time playing an oud was when I snuck into his room as a 14 year-old. We always had Greek and Turkish music in the house, and over the last almost ten years I've visited Turkey frequently to study. I just love playing the oud but because I've never really taken any lessons, my relationship with the instrument is a bit unrefined. Yet, my oud mentor, the great Armenian-American musician Ara Dinkjian, has been very insistent that I continue to develop my voice on the instrument without formal, traditional studies. He likes the unconventional way in which I approach the instrument. I treat it almost more like a blues slide guitar, and he wants to see what happens if I stay on this course.” "Where you Wish you Were" has nothing of a world jazz fusion album about it, and was never intended be one. "Bill and I are very clear about not pretending that this project has anything to do with replicating any regional styles with deep roots," emphasises League. "We're committed to creating something that is uniquely ours, even if it retains certain elements of established genres of music." And so it is, as is so often the case in the musical world which is now called "jazz": the universe of personal, musical and sonic influences of the two musicians do not serve to set limits or to categorise, but rather as a vocabulary which allows the two musicians’ own distinctive mode of expression to shine through. With compositions focused entirely on melody, harmony and space, a warm sound and the soulful playing of the two players, League and Laurance have created a place which is not just conducive to dreams; it is a place to which the listener will want to return to again and again.Credits: Produced by Bill Laurance and Michael League Cover art "Opus 18" by Nadia Attura