Martin Archer, Walt Shaw

"Because I make records in a number of different styles, I often filter and change my saxophone playing to match the style of the record I’m making. But when I make a work like this, you hear my playing in my natural, unfiltered style, and that style is determined by the many AACM records which were most influential in forming my own playing. That’s especially true in this duo setting with Walt Shaw, where the music is stripped down to its essence of blues + abstraction. It’s really simple - I’m not a complicated player. I just play in a way which pleases me and which I hope connects back in some small way to the players I really love to hear.

Walt is the ideal partner for this type of duo. Like me, he’s developed his own methodology and palette of sounds which is based on a feel for the architecture of the music as opposed to being rocket-fuelled by technical manuals. On this session I chose to use all of the five of the members of the saxophone family which I play - alto, sopranino, tenor, baritone, saxello. The pieces are heard in the order we played them, and because we didn’t hang around between takes or do any second takes, you just need the same amount of time to listen to this record as it took us to make it.

The song titles are in the Hausa language, which Walt became familiar with when he and his wife Joanne taught as volunteers in northern Nigeria for a while." - Martin Archer