London Jazz Festival



How was it performing at the Mercury Music Prize?
'It was fun, a lot of fun definitely. It was quite nerve wracking actually because you just get the three minutes to go on and perform and that’s your thing. So it’s not like on a gig where you get a chance to redeem yourself if you mess up! So we were all focusing on that three minutes, but it was a lot of fun as well. Just to be amongst those other artists was a pretty incredible thing really, I’ve listened to Radiohead my whole life so just to be nominated beside them was great.'

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And obviously it must have switched a lot of new listeners on to your music?
'Yeah, our album sales have jumped up quite substantially, definitely for a small band like us the Mercury is a massive thing, but for a band like Radiohead maybe not so. So in that sense we’ve just had a lot more exposure. I suppose everything that we wanted to do in two years just gets squashed into about two months; it’s like a big accelerator. So now we have loads more opportunities and loads more people interested in what we do. It’s kind of a stamp of quality as well.'

How did your time busking on the South Bank help you create Portico’s unique sound?


'It was a great way to start. In terms of the ideas and how they developed we’d just go down there and be busking but we’d kind of have to perform at the same time we were rehearsing. So we’d jam out tunes and get some kind of structure to them, but try and relate to the audience as well. We’d jam in our houses as well but a lot of the early playing we did was on the South Bank in front of people. We’d often just start with an idea on the hang, a real short cyclical idea, or maybe two ideas, made into a loop, and then me and Milo (Portico’s bassist) just with melodies and different harmonies around that sequence. And we’d do that for hours on end. Each piece would be about five or six minutes long and we’d play them all day. And gradually those pieces became honed into something with a proper structure.'

There are lots of very ‘vocal’ melodies that run through the band’s music – as the sax player do you try and create a vocalised melody to the tunes?
'I don’t know, some of them definitely are, I do draw on a lot of vocal melodies but then with a saxophone you’ve got the opportunity to do more technical, fast-moving stuff which a vocalist couldn’t get away with, like if you tried to sing "News From Verona".'

Who do you listen to for inspiration at the moment?
'At the moment I’m listening to a lot of Michael Blake, who is a New York sax player who plays with the bass player Ben Allison – who’s actually playing at the London Jazz Festival at Pizza Express. I saw them there about a year ago and they were amazing, really, really good.' 



They are another new jazz band made up of serious musicians that are using strong melodies throughout each of their songs aren’t they?


'Yeah that was a lot of the stuff that me and Duncan, [PQ’s hang player], in particular, were listening to when we started doing Portico. It has real strong hooks and real strong melodies and quite kind of "sectioned" as well. And that sax player is on a lot of his albums, especially one called "Peace Pipe" that came out about seven years ago, it’s got a kora player on it as well, it’s fucking wicked, it’s one of my favourite albums. That’s got this guy Michael Blake on as well. In terms of other sax players I saw Polar Bear recently with Pete Wareham and Mark Lockheart. I took some lessons with Pete actually a while ago, so I took a lot from those guys.'

He’s a brilliant player but he’s so good at playing minimal riffs but making them sound massive. 


'Yes he’s a really strong player. But he was telling me that he did his masters degree at the Guildhall School Of Jazz, and he’d been a hardcore jazz guy and had learnt all his jazz harmony and his way around it. Then he got to the end of that and actually went “fuck it, I’m just going to play what I want to play, and play the music I like playing.” Then he started doing all the Acoustic Ladyland stuff and left all the hardcore jazz theory behind. I haven’t been that heavily schooled but I know a fair amount about jazz theory but I definitely think on the Portico thing as well we are deliberately not playing in a really jazz kind of way. Though there are opportunities to do it.'

There are a lot of UK jazz groups now that are playing in a much more song-based ‘band’ kind of way, Portico are very much part of that scene aren’t they?
'Sort of like post-jazz! [Laughs]. Yeah it’s definitely nice to be part of that scene. All the bands are quite different and each one is playing like you say in a more band type way rather than having one soloist. Bands like Pete Wareham’s Final Terror, with baritone sax… that’s proper good!

'

What are your plans to develop the Portico Sound?
'Well I’ve just got myself a clip-on mic and a few effects things like this weird box where you can put things into thirds, but then with a footswitch you can switch to fourths and fifths so I can double up a lot of melodies to create some interesting harmonies but you have to be quite delicate with the footswitch. I also got a loop station as there are some possibilities there definitely. Actually I was listening to someone else who’s at the London Jazz Festival, a guy from Norway called Arve Henriksen [who's also at the LJF as part of PUNKT UK], I listened to his tracks on MySpace a few days ago and he is just wicked.' 



Are there any other Scandinavian musicians you’ve been listening to?


'The new EST album "Leucocyte", which is wicked, I’m really, really into that.' [There’s a remembrance concert for Esbjorn Svensson at the LJF on November 16.]

And what do think about jazz breaking away from its more traditional sound?


'There’s definitely conservatism in jazz to know your chops and do things a certain way and it’s nice to push things away from that. I think jazz, if it was down to the really conservative guys, could become quite stale through just playing old standards. But it’s a dynamic art form in my opinion and it should keep on progressing and moving in new directions. And there are bands like us who I suppose are a bit more accessible, but there are also people who really interesting as well like Led Bib and Fraud who might not be quite as accessible but personally I think they are great too.' 



What other bands have you heard recently?
'I saw The Invisible who were the best band I’ve seen in a long time. Dave Okumu is an absolute don on the guitar, and I suppose they fit into the whole post-jazz scene as well but more like rock, but definitely like a real strong band playing together. All amazing players but writing cracking tunes with a kind of '80s disco feel to a lot of them with loads of ideas but with loads of different melodies all over the place. Really, really good. I saw the Necks at the Vortex quite a while ago but that was a fantastic gig. I also checked out Matthew Herbert’s Big Band at The Big Chill this year that was wicked.'

You played the Big Chill as well this year, how did the gig go?


'I think it was one of the best gigs we’ve ever played actually, it was really good. I felt absolutely awful before, got up with a storming hangover and staggered my way down to the stage. I was sick about ten minutes before we went on, but then I actually felt alright once I was on, I felt absolutely fine, then we played a wicked gig. Brilliant fun.' 



What’s the plan for the new Portico album?
'I’m not sure! We’ve just started rehearsing for it and we’ve got a couple of tunes, but the way we are approaching it is to get down the tunes and the songs and the melodies and the forms first and then start arranging them on different instruments. So we’re going to have the core tunes, maybe similar to the first album in that they are quite heavy melody and rhythm, but then rearrange them on the marimba, piano…

'

Who’s playing the piano?


'I’m on keyboards yeah… and glockenspiel, and we’ve got some effects. Milo might pick up the electric bass guitar too, it’s all going out! [laughs]. We’re in that typical second album position on that we want to move on from the first album but you don’t want to lose the good elements that you had. So some strong tunes but with different instrumentation, we’re getting some violinists to come in on a few tracks as well. A couple of collaborations possibly, one that has to remain secret for now, also Nick and Milo have been playing a lot with Seth Lakeman over in Africa: they went over to the Lake Of Stars Festival because Nick was doing some solo stuff over there. And Nick, Milo and Seth Lakeman did a gig, I think he might come and play violin on some of the tracks.'

Portico Quartet play the Purcell Room on 19 November. They also take part in the Hear Me Talkin' Ya series at the Front Room at the QEH on the same day at 6pm.