Sam Gill's Coursed Waters: Many Altered Returns

In conjunction with Earshift Music, Sydney based saxophonist-composer Sam Gill announces his new album Many Altered Returns. The album is the first release by his quartet Coursed Waters, a Melbourne/Sydney collaboration featuring drummer James McLean alongside pianist Novak Manojlovic and bassist Jacques Emery. 

The music of Many Altered Returns is a culmination of three years of collaborative exploration and refinement. Across the album’s six tracks, Many Altered Returns navigates expanses of open improvisation within Gill’s provocative multi-sectional compositions, moving between moments of extreme density to whispering repose. 

The inspiration for Many Altered Returns draws from Gill’s interest in the line between highly structured composition and free improvisation: “All of the music I love as a listener shares the quality of sounding both tightly organised and completely spontaneous,” says Gill, “leaving me feeling disoriented in some way. So my aim when writing for Coursed Waters was to foster a group approach that could generate that disorientating feeling in our own, personal way.” 

With this aesthetic goal, Gill has created a body of compositions that push rhythm to the foreground of the music, written with the unique creative voices of McLean, Manojlovic and Emery in mind. “When we play together, there’s often a rhythm cycle that we’re improvising around or referencing in some abstract way, but we try to avoid stating the cycle explicitly. We’re more interested in being able to hold a state of playful ambiguity.” Variations on unfamiliar themes, recurrences without clear boundaries. It is these ideas of disguised cycles and hidden repetitions that inform the album’s title, Many Altered Returns. 

Gill is an emerging voice within the Australian jazz and improvising community. He has performed with a number of Australia’s leading improvisers including Simon Barker, Paul Cutlan, Chris Hale, Andrea Keller and Gian Slater, as well as acclaimed ensembles such as world-music ensemble Mara! and the Australian Art Orchestra. In addition to Coursed Waters, he leads and co-leads several groups including Scattered, Microfiche and Mind On Fire. He has appeared on numerous records including Mind on Fire's The Process of Unbecoming (2017), Microfiche's self-titled 2016 album, and the Sydney Conservatorium Jazz Orchestra’s 2017 release Okay.