Passport
Jazz trumpeter and composer Matthew Halsall shares with Bryony Cottam why travel is part of his creative life
Matthew’s travel insights
• Concentrate on the sound of a place – really listen
• Use music to connect to nature. It improves your mental health
• Unusual places, particularly those that are wild, can help you be creative
As he looks out over Anglesey’s Newborough beach, Matthew Halsall breaks down the landscape into different sounds. There’s the double bass, which provides the deep, earthy tones of the forest, the glittering notes of a harp, which sound like rain, and the drums that produce the energy of the waves. It’s here that Halsall, an English trumpet player and jazz composer, wrote much of a recent album, An Ever Changing View.
Travel, particularly time spent in wild and natural landscapes, has long been a source of inspiration to Halsall. ‘I’ve always liked making music in different environments,’ he says. ‘Even at home, my studio has a big window that looks out onto the garden.’ When he travels beyond the UK, he says it’s often to places that feel wild or isolated, such as the bamboo forests of Japan, or Kiyomizu-dera, a Buddhist temple hidden among the Japanese maple forests in eastern Kyoto.
Both Kiyomizu-dera and Sagano bamboo forest have been re-imagined in his music, while the sounds of birdsong, recorded on that beach in Wales, have also made their way into several tracks. ‘If you can create music in beautiful locations,’ he says, ‘and you can capture those views and those feelings in that music, you can create incredible atmospheres that transport people to these unique places through sound.’
Halsall’s music, which has been described as ambient or spiritual jazz, is at odds with the noise and bustle of Manchester, where he lives with his partner and their Romanian rescue dog. Here, alongside his trumpet, Halsall keeps a considerable collection of drums, chimes, kalimbas and bells, as well as a pile of recycled bottle tops, pebbles and seeds, which he uses to recreate the sounds of his travels. ‘Percussion is really important,’ he adds. ‘It’s a very primitive but very effective way of bringing textures and sounds into a composition.’ He loves his life in the city, surrounded by friends and musicians, but he feels just as much at home on the peaceful coastline of North Wales, which he visits several times a year. It’s there, he says, that he finds the quiet and the solitude he needs to compose.
As a young man, Halsall spent years learning about spiritual philosophies and practising meditation and yoga. Time spent in nature, he says, has been just as important for his mental health. ‘Sometimes your brain is just so full of clutter and there’s so much noise,’ he adds. ‘Being in nature always makes me feel really grounded, calm and peaceful, and so positive about life.’ He sees both travel and music as forms of escapism, adding that, as a child, putting on a pair of headphones was ‘like shutting out the outside world and escaping to some magical place’.
In the same way that travel has inspired his music, Halsall says that music can enhance and add to the experience of a place, too. He encourages travellers to really listen to the sounds they can hear, perhaps even choose a playlist to suit the location. ‘I have this idea that someone who is a fan of my music could go to these locations and listen to the music in the place in which it was created. I’d be really interested to know whether they can get a sense of why I made the music that way.’ He worries that the untouched natural beauty of places such as Anglesey is becoming increasingly rare. ‘I hope that if I can capture the feeling of the place in my music, people listening to my music might connect to nature and to the ideas of escapism, and maybe start to enjoy these things too.’
