Friday, December 01, 2023

Miles Spilsbury - Light Manoeuvres

Debut album from UK jazz saxophonist and composer Miles Spilsbury, featuring Carlos Niño. Produced by Slugabed.

Light Manoeuvres is about warmth, generosity and openness. The music which would become Light Manoeuvres was sketched in fragments, but began to take shape in earnest during a period of living under the Marseille haze in the South of France. 

The specific character and opacity of the light in Marseille inspired the album title which imagines the movement of light passing over different subjects and spaces in intricate motion. Sand blows over from the Sahara on the Sirocco wind and is whipped up by the Mistral, the Marseille sky becomes golden and vapoured, then intermittently pastel blue. That image stuck while shaping this body of work, and became integral to the function of the compositions - which act as jumping off points for the players and myself, vehicles for improvisation and gateways to something else entirely. 

Tracklist:
1. Cloud Formations
2. Gratitude
3. Light Theme
4. Cyclamen
5. Water on Water
6. Tungsten
7. Uig
8. En-Vau