Four conversations. Four takes. Four tracks.

Freely improvising in a group is a risky endeavour as an artist. Everyone is working together to create this thing, but nobody knows what it will actually be. More often than not, it's a whole series of things, a collection of precious moments which somehow emerge out of your collective efforts. The resulting performances drift through musical ideas, getting pulled this way and the next by the relative gravity of each idea. However, it could all collapse in a moment – your gut instinct could be wrong, and you end up sounding either like you're completely oblivious to what is going on around you, uninspired and stiff, or simply boring. Likewise, your intentions may be too grand for your technique, and you end up sounding incompetent. Thus, this kind of improvisation is incredibly emotional and personal, regardless of what is created.

Tangents consists of four freely improvised tracks recorded by myself, Steve Lawson, and Andy Edwards. Each track allows a window into our interactions as musicians – what happens when our personalities collide in a studio and on stage. We don't know how you would classify what kind of performing experience we have made… but we like it. We never expected what happened, but couldn't have hoped for a more interesting musical journey. This album came together as a bit of an experiment. After teaching with Andy at Kidderminster College for a year, we started a new course: an HND in Music Performance. We insisted on hiring new lecturers who were not only at the cutting edge of the music industry, but would also challenge us musically. Thus, we hired the venerable Steve on electric bass, as well as guitarist and composer Phi Yaan-Zek. Over the year, we played together off and on during lessons, eventually leading to a recording session over the Easter holidays in 2014.

At this time, I began experimenting with putting my bass trombone through live effects. Egged on by my students, I discovered an entirely new palette of sounds that were synthesised, yet created on an acoustic instrument. This has wildly changed my approach towards playing, and I am very excited to share my first steps into this kind of performance.

Each track on the album is freely improvised, and we didn't agree on (or even discuss) a structure or plan before playing. However, given our gregarious natures, we did have extensive eclectic conversations before each take. As these random topics were the last things that we discussed before recording, snippets of them became the track names. Surprisingly, all of the tracks that we recorded were around the same length. Whether or not this was because we simply ran out of ideas at the 20-minute mark or because of some underlying sense of periodic form, this does mean that each track retains the ebb and flow of our improvisations as they were played live – including how they trailed off after we had exhausted ourselves, in some cases.

I would like to express my sincerest thanks to both Steve and Andy for their encouragement and enthusiasm with this project. Their astounding musicianship makes every time we play a joy. Likewise, their help in mixing, mastering, and producing the album was invaluable, and I have learnt so much from them. In addition, I would like to thank Rob Groucutt for recording and videoing our performances, as well as his input in producing the album.