The start of a new concert season is always a cause for celebration for fans of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra. This year that feeling is doubly justified as the SNJO marks twenty-five highly creative years as the UK’s only full-time, national jazz orchestra. We begin the year appropriately enough with performances that mark the centenary of the late Edwin Morgan, Scotland’s first modern Makar as we pay tribute to Edwin with an important landmark piece of prose and music.
‘Planet Wave’ features original music by Tommy Smith and Morgan’s poetry in spoken word theatre provided by actor Niall Greig Fulton, but it will, however, go far beyond mere tribute. First conceived more than twenty years ago as an extraordinary collaboration between Smith and Morgan, Planet Wave has come of age. It is a brilliant collage of modern music, electronica, sampled sounds, visionary poetry and performance that foreshadowed multi-disciplinary artistic expression in the 21st Century.
Always a little ahead of their time, Smith and Morgan created an expansive aural exploration of our home planet on waves of history from 20 billion years B.C. to the Age of Copernicus 1543 A. D. Along the way, we are invited to witness major events and ‘see with our ears’ the birth of Universe, the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, a titanic biblical flood, the construction of the Great Pyramid, and the discovery of the Solar System.
More than two decades may have passed since Tommy Smith first commissioned an outstanding suite of visionary poems from Morgan, but the music and the message have never been more immediate. In Planet Wave, the contemporary appetite for time travel and our fascination with imagined worlds is more than satisfied in an epic depiction of our island Earth as a mysterious and unknown quantity.
The SNJO directed by Tommy Smith always relish the opportunity to visit a large canvas but this time the scale is colossal. Yet, the dynamic demanded by such themes, from the smallest whisper to the biggest bang, are well within their compass. Throughout Planet Wave, Edwin Morgan (surely a poet laureate for the multiverse) assumed the role of a time-hopping, cosmic bard and his legacy is an evocative, yet typically wry, observational narrative. Sailing sideways through time may forever be the stuff of dreams, but audiences can catch a momentous wave with the SNJO and be part of a rare, historic and seismic event in words and music.
Concert Dates:
Fri 21st February The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh at 1930
Sat 22nd February: The City Halls, Glasgow at 1930
Sun 23rd February: Queen’s Cross Church, Aberdeen at 1700