Multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer corto.alto shares ‘Latency’, the latest single from his debut album, Bad With Names, (out on LP, CD, and digitally Friday October 6th) via New Soil x Bridge The Gap and shares details of his UK tour.

‘Latency’ is the album’s third single, which ripples with the vibrancy of the Glasgow jazz scene it has emerged from. Written for his friend’s Mateusz and Noushy club night GLITCH41, it features Stormzy and Jacob Collier collaborator James Copus, and speaks of Shortall’s love for the people and place he calls home – a fiercely independent and supportive environment which he says has become “really meaningful and important” in helping him to “reconnect with live music and improvising.”

The moniker of Glasgow-based Liam Shortall, corto.alto brings a fresh perspective to a heady mix of intuitive improvisation, electronic production, broken beat bounce and bass-heavy dub. An honest, iconoclastic album Bad With Names, is challenging the boundaries of contemporary jazz.

Having cut his teeth playing trombone in Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and making beats in his bedroom, Shortall has the chops to match the top players in the country and beyond. Proud of his Glaswegian upbringing and Irish-Spanish heritage (corto.alto translate as short, tall in Spanish), his renegade sound is a constant push-and-pull of bravado and vulnerability. As he explains, “the title Bad With Names comes from feeling like in the madness of it all you’re losing the ability of memory, or at least the illusion of that.”

“This album also deals with my own reluctance to start the process of making music, as I find it to be incredibly daunting and vulnerable,” he explains, candid to the last. “Each time I come to the stage I am in now – the home run – I always hope it will be my last release. And then forgetting that all over again and falling back in love with the creative process, like being in a dysfunctional relationship that you keep going back to.”

On Bad With Names, corto.alto is standing tall, holding the torch for Glasgow and ready to rip up the rulebook in the process.

Live dates:

Oct 14 – London, Jazz Cafe
Oct 16 – Manchester, Band On The Wall
Oct 17 – Leeds, Belgrave Theatre Hall
Oct 18 – Birmingham, The Hare & Hounds
Oct 20 – Bristol, Strange Brew
Oct 21 – Glasgow, QMU