Composer. Jazz trombonist. Artist.

MANIFSTO: Make magic sound stuff

“a Brit who defies every conceivable genre boundary…an extremely modern and future-oriented style.”
Paul Hindemith Prize winner 2023
"a highly innovative...of exceptional creative imagination and musical energy, packed with life force unlike anything else.”
Ivor Novello British Composer Awards. Winner 2021
“Unbridled joy…sophisticated, passionate music full of pulsating energy and stylistic diversity.“ Ernst von Siemens Composition Prize 2023

Alex (1990), ”highly innovative...of exceptional creative imagination and musical energy, packed with life force unlike anything else” (BBC Magazine/Ivor Novello British Composer Awards.) is an award-winning composer & jazz-trombonist. His scores are published by Ricordi (Berlin).

He has been described as “A Magician of Sound...hyperkinetic rainbow-hued...joy & freedom” (Financial Times), “the most joyous sound I’ve heard in ages!” (New York Times),  "A riotous overabundance of love and rage...an extraordinary experience” (The Wire),”a system-crasher of genre...unmistakable style...highly complex, sophisticated and extremely entertaining, virtuoso ad absurdum" (Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik), and “a super nova...a brazen sensorial mash up...riot and a rainbow...brimmingly heartfelt multi sensorial, genuinely energising fizzer of a new work...super charged joy...forces us all to sit up and loosen up and buck up” (Kate Mollison BBC New Music Show.)

His music has been awarded: an Ivor Novello, Paul Hindemith Prize: a Brit who defies every conceivable genre boundary…an extremely modern and future-oriented style” Ernst von Siemens Composer Prize: “Unbridled joy…sophisticated, passionate music full of pulsating energy and stylistic diversity”, Elb Philharmonie’s Claussen Simon Composition Prize, RPS Royal Philharmonic Society Prize, Dankworth Jazz Prize, Leverhume Art Scholarship with the London Philharmonic Orchestra , the Harriet Cohen Memorial Music Award. 

“Some of the most genuinely extraordinary orchestral music you’ll ever have the good fortune to experience...staggeringly happy...unstoppable, continue-at-all-costs need to sing. Melody is literally everywhere...it’s undeniably a superabundance, yet it’s also an unbelievable, glorious treat” 5 against 4.

Alex has released three critically acclaimed albums MUSIC for BOSCH PEOPLE (Birmingham Record Company/ NMC label), iLOLLI-POP (non-classical) and HAPPY MUSIC for ORCHESTRA (Delphian) as well as many smaller releases. Each has been widely reviewed and featured in Uk, USA and Europe in broad sheets (NYT, Guardian, Times, Financial Times etc) and Music magazines (The Wire. Quitus, Bandcamp, Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, Crescendo,Positionen, Point of Departure etc.) He is a commissioned contributor to John Zorn’s Arcana X 2021. “This is what an orchestra can be like in the 21st century: an ensemble that speaks with one voice yet also gives voice to each of its members” The Times

His music is frequently performed internationally by many of the worlds leading orchestras, ensembles and festivals: London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), WDR Symphony Orchestra, NDR Elb Philharmonie, Ensemble Modern, Klang Forum Wien, London Sinfonietta, AskSchöenberg, Riot Ensemble, Explore Ensemble, Ensemble Klang, London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO), Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), National Youth Orchestra GB, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (BSO) Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain,, BBC proms, Bang on a Can Long Play, Festival d'Automne, MearzMusik, Guadeamus, ECLAT, impulse Graz, Now essen, Klangspuren swartz, Wigmore hall, Klammer Klang,, Making Music (UK), Hyper Duo, National Youth Jazz Orchestra (UK) NYJO, Listen-Pony, Aldeburgh Festival. “Alex Paxton's fascinating score impressed me from the very first moment...the notes literally jumped out at me from the score; it was clear that this was a unique compositional voice, combining a complex, almost chaotic sensibility with a charming grounding in folk tradition.” conductor Alan Gilbert

He has written six operas hosted by English National Opera and Helios Collective, Tête à Tête opera festival, Second Movement Opera. “Operatic Game Boy music played by a virtuosic motley crew that’s inexplicably been hired to provide live jingles for a primetime TV show sometime in the recent past that never quite was” Point of departure

As a jazz trombone soloist “Paxton is a monster improviser” (Bandcamp) Alex has performed concerto-like pieces of his own with WDR Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Asko:Schoenberg,  Riot Ensemble, Ensemble Klang, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), & ensemble x.y.

He is founder of Dreammusics ensemble and performs regularly with pioneering improvisers (eg: Charlotte Keeffe, Steve Noble). “meticulously scored…seems to change with every bar, enfolding bite-size pieces of classic minimalism, brass brand tradition, electronic noise, & video game plasticity..intensely virtuosic and giddily joyful. electronically slathered trombone…connects his garrulous attack to the most extroverted playing of George Lewis & Roswell Rudd..." Bandcamp Daily Best Contemporary Classical.

Alex has written extensively for musicians in community settings including, innovative ways of writing for young instrumentalists & singers in a post-Roald Dahl world of new-music.  eg: NOGGIN and the WHALE (Massed forces including 500 young instrumentalists and singes), Fly Like a Kitchen, Muffin, Pudding Tummy and The smelling test.

He is professorial composition staff at Trinity Laban Conservatoire and has worked as lead-composition tutor (and workshop leader) on the National Youth Orchestra GB, he has taught/ lectured at composition and improvisation at conservatories including, RAM, GSMD, RCM, The Royal Conservatoire (NL) (and multiple universities).

Alex studied as a scholar at Royal Academy of Music & the Royal College of Music.

Alex is an endorsed solo artist with Micheal Rath Trombones.

“not only was extraordinary musically, but brought diverse communities together in ways that exemplified a new, creolized identity for classical music. Alex’s vision of new music could help to transform classical music into a true world music.” George Lewis laudatory Speech quotation 2023

"Paxton is a system-crasher of genre, who merges jamming video game soundtracks, musical overtures, virtuoso chamber music and jazz improv into an unmistakable style...highly complex, sophisticated and extremely entertaining, virtuoso ad absurdum" Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik (Music For Bosch People)

Relentlessly playful...a manic frenzy of sampled instruments careening like a demented merry-go-round on fast forward.” The Wire Magazine (Car-Pig)

“Paxton's full-throttle high-energy compositional style is totally unique...Imagine if the child of Frank Zappa & Bjork studied with John Zorn and then decided to do their own thing anyway...a vital, exciting and exceptional” Plannet Hugill by Florence Anderson (Car-Pig)

Soundmaking podcast · Soundmaking episode 5: Alexander Paxton, Prayer for Strings and Joan Rivers

New York Times

extended review

SoundmakingPodcast

interview with Alex Paxton

Prxludes

interview with Alex Paxton

The Trombonist  Magazine

interview with Alex Paxton

Resonance FM

feature with Alex Paxton

The Sampler

THE WIRE

Alex Paxton

UK Mexican Arts Society, London, UK


In improvised music, it can sometimes feel like the solo performance has become a fetish. There’s something seductive about the purity of sound as solo statement that has seen it proliferate. Then there is the economics of such a scene: the solo is simply cheaper. It can of course be beautiful to hear somebody playing alone, but it’s rarely a substitute for the sociality of several musical voices together. Still, having listened to Alex Paxton’s debut album, Music For Bosch People, I was ready to go see him in whatever live setting he would be playing first. The occasion presented itself on Saturday 12th June at the UK Mexican Arts Society, a small independent gallery in Somers Town.

Paxton was playing solo trombone. But since both he and his trombone were several, there was already quite a crowd. His sound was monstrous and multiple—a stretching and splitting of the bounds of the solo form itself. Paxton achieved this in three ways. First, there was the sheer ferocity and velocity of his playing—what he has described as his attempt to put his horn in “perpetual motion” (no mean feat on an instrument that has neither valves nor keys, rendering circular breathing a particular challenge). His elastic-ecstatic-spasmodic trombone made it sound as if there were several voices babbling away at once—a passionate palaver. Second, Paxton made use of his actual voice. Gasps, yelps, half-words, and garbled sentences escaped out the horn. Paxton slipped his voice in and around the instrument, squeezing it through the smallest of cracks in the musical barrage. Third, he got the audience to sing along, creating moments of antiphony that were both touching and self-consciously humorous. Imagine a scene from Sesame Street with a tuneless choir and a deranged trombone virtuoso and you get some idea.

In God’s Trombones, James Weldon Johnson stated that this is “the instrument possessing above all others the power to express the wide and varied range of emotions encompassed by the human voice—and with greater amplitude”. Paxton’s playing is testament to this observation. While Johnson had in mind the voice of the African American preacher, Paxton’s trombone seems to transmute a scrambled range of human speech, reflecting something of the frenetic and fragmentary form of contemporary discourse. And yet Johnson’s trombone-like description of a preacher is still apt for Paxton’s performance: “[h]e intoned, he moaned, he pleaded—he blared, he crashed, he thundered”.

Paxton is an improviser who is not afraid of “idioms”. He eats idioms for breakfast. That’s why his music is so sweet and so strange. Gone is any agonised avoidance of clichés or calculated coolness. In its place is a riotous, hot pink overabundance of love and rage (“Prayer Like Hot Pink” is the last track on his album, and at the gig he was sporting a hot pink t-shirt topped off by the magnificent mid-set addition of a rainbow flag headband). In amongst the angular atonal twists and turns, all of a sudden comes the roar of an unabashed blues shout or the plodding aplomb of a colliery brass band. It’s music grounded in the solid content of sentiment and spiralled through a stratosphere of forms. It’s frank and vibrational, emotional and dizzying. It links up “what is direct with what is advanced” (Amiri Baraka). It’s bizarrely moving music—go and hear it.” Gabriel Bristow the WIRE

Point of Departure

extended review
Alex Paxton
Music for Bosch People
Birmingham Record Company BRC011 

Alex Paxton’s first album is serious music saturated with the silly. This is high art stuffed full of the kind of pop culture that is so quotidian you don’t even notice it’s there unless someone like Paxton comes along and blows it out of proportion, warps it almost beyond recognition through the tubes of his elastic-ecstatic-spasmodic trombone. When I spoke to him, Paxton told me he wants to put his horn in “perpetual motion” – no mean feat on an instrument with neither valves nor keys, rendering circular breathing particularly complicated. Yet for all this grueling technical striving – stimulating in-and-of-itself – Paxton’s playing also leans on the trombone’s human (animal!) qualities: humor and pathos born of the transmutation of the voice. In the opening passages of the album’s title track – a sort of stand-alone suite – we hear the trombone run the gamut from furious chatter to muffled screams, sorrowful sighs into searing growls and back. “Virtuosic” doesn’t really cover it.

The album is titled Music for Bosch People. Personally, the notable washing machine manufacturer was what first came to mind (the music certainly sounds like it’s been spun around at high velocity for several hours). Apparently, my intuition was not entirely wrong: Paxton explains in an interview that he has two Bosch washing machines in his house. The main point of reference is, however, Hieronymus Bosch, the 15th-16th century Dutch painter whose fantastical renderings of everyday life act as loose inspiration and analogue for the music. But that’s not all. Music for Bosch People is also a play on “music for posh people,” simultaneously sending up classical music and the commercial uses it’s put to. The music itself is as multi-layered as the title’s meaning, so dense with references it sounds like it’s about to burst. Paxton calls this his “Where’s Wally aesthetic.” Though that’s not exactly what he meant when he said it to me (he was, specifically, responding to a question about the moment in the middle of “Prayer in the Darkness” where his falsetto trombone quotes Ornette Coleman’s “Dancing In Your Head”) this is what I mean when I say that pop culture saturates his sound. Another way to put it could be: operatic Game Boy music played by a virtuosic motley crew that’s inexplicably been hired to provide live jingles for a primetime TV show sometime in the recent past that never quite was. This sound is produced by layers and layers of recording piled high like a teetering Tower of Babel (Pieter Breugel, who painted three versions of the aforementioned biblical structure, is another of Paxton’s favorites). In more pedestrian terms, the music is made by shapeshifting combinations of trombone, voices, electric guitars, saxophones, piccolo, violin, viola and electronics. The resulting edifice has a back-to-the-future quality to it: anachronistic music that feels more futuristic than the present.

Music for Bosch People is unabashedly weird. But despite its silliness – at times teetering on the edge of irony, or even tipping right over into it – the album remains touching. Just listen to “Prayer with Night Pictures” and try not to squirm. What is all that celestial squealing? And why does it make me want to laugh and cry at the same time? The paintings of Hieronymus Bosch certainly contain clues, described variously as “wondrous,” “gruesome,” “fantastica,” “horrific,” and so on. But the music itself is both dense and expansive enough to yield its own answers – most likely a different one on each listening. Here too the parallel with a Bosch painting is apt: each time you go back to it you’re liable to discover something different, another detail lurking in plain sight. Or are we talking about Where’s Wally again? It doesn’t really matter. The point is this is music to re-listen to and get lost in.
–Gabriel Bristow. Moment’s Notics Point of Departure.

Positionen

Complexity is supposed to be dead – or at least, to borrow Richard Taruskin’s description, “terminal”. It certainly seems like it: the domain of old men banging on about “catarhythmic timeline modifyers” and “interruptive polyphony”. Indeed, complexity is so dead that multiple generations of composers across the aesthetic spectrum have reacted to the decline of postwar Modernism by making music that asks the question: “what if I wrote music that actually sounded nice?” In Britain at least this has resulted in a lot of new composition which is easy going and consonant, friendly even. All well and good, but it can sometimes feel like eating a diet exclusively comprised of cake. Sometimes you want to eat cake but sometimes you want to eat a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Step forward Alex Paxton, incipient savior of difficult listening, with his album Music for Bosch People. The title track is a high-octane, 15-minute odyssey of obsessively repeating riffs, avant jazz harmonies, extended technique brass solos, prog rock organ, stuttering drums… I could go on. The patron saint of this kind of high intensity poly stylism is John Zorn, and the influence of his 1990 album Naked City hovers over Paxton’s album. The tracks on Naked City are intense bullets of musical information, none over 5 minutes, almost half under 60 seconds. Paxton takes this level of intensity and builds larger forms using jarring layers that animate the entire audible field and jostle with each other, competing for the foreground of the texture. A precedent for this is Harrison Birtwistle’s large-scale work Secret Theatre from 1984 where an elliptical cantus firmus holds together constantly shifting textures; for Paxton, neurotic riffs serve the same function. Music for Bosch People is a brutally airless kaleidoscope of twentieth-century musical trash: 1980s video game sounds, 1990s tv themes, 1950s big band schmaltz – on multiple listens the piece is almost nostalgic, Paxton eschewing the clipped digital racket of the twenty-first century.

“Londonglum” is a trombone solo performed with formidable virtuosity by Paxton himself. It seems to be a meditation on virtuosity: Paxton’s own take on Charlie Parker-style bebop or Paganini. The piece sounds like he’s wrestling his trombone, which has come to life and is forcing him play Flight of the Bumblebee. Amid manic runs of notes Paxton shouts, groans and yelps in protest. The piece reminds me of the 1947 American radio play for children, Sparky’s Magic Piano. A musical fable, Sparky’s piano comes alive and allows him play the most virtuosic piano repertoire without having to practice, only to humiliatingly abandon him on stage at Carnegie Hall. Paxton seems wary of his talent, hostile to it, suspicious of its gifts. His virtuosity is without fluency: his trombone playing is immensely effortful, the sound is strangled and you can hear his ragged breathing throughout the recording.

The album ends with five pieces with titles including the word ‘Prayer’, and while they are not exactly prayerful in the traditional sense they have a comparatively contemplative and nocturnal quality. In Paxton’s music, the surprise generated by snatched moments of stasis, repetition or arrival demonstrates how furiously unstable the rest of it is. “Prayer with Night Pictures” has a sultry expressiveness combined with Bach-like arpeggiation; “Prayer in the Darkness” combines Baroque trills and flourishes with jazz close harmonisations. There are moments of softness here but they are never straightforward: always accompanied by layers of frenetic electronic fiddling or trombone yowling.

Bosch’s paintings are a good visual analogy for Paxton’s music: mountains of crisp detail that are legible when taken singly but accumulate into a surreal and overwhelming whole. Paxton’s music and playing seems possessed by an inorganic energy: it doesn’t ebb and flow, it doesn’t get tired. It churns away with the unstoppable but varied mechanical precision of a washing machine, maybe a Bosch. - Edward Henderson


This position is published in German translation in Positionen issue #128, August 2021.

LondonJazzNews

Not a lot causes this writer to laugh out loud, but this album did, repeatedly. For improvising trombonist, prolific composer and band-leader Alex Paxton’s new electro-acoustic album Music For Bosch People is a witty and exhilarating kaleidoscope of musical ideas, with a stew of references ranging from musique concrète to Frank Zappa. Still only in his early 30s, Paxton has already composed for orchestra, opera, film, theatre and, perhaps most impressively of all, for children.

For Music For Bosch People he engages a cast of similarly spirited fellow improvisor-musicians, in variable configurations across the seven tracks; check out the impressive list of names at the end of this review.

The first, title track is the longest at over 15 minutes and is a tour de force. Paxton reportedly left ample space in his score for each musician to improvise, and all of them certainly rise to the challenge. The cavalcade of cheeky brass blurts and squawks, strange vocalisations and hyperactive electronics doesn’t detract from the clearly evident compositional chops and musicianship. The contrasting next track, Londonglum, has Paxton improvising solo on screaming/groaning/farting trombone and voice: a fury-laden outcry.

The remaining five so-called Prayer tracks are if anything even more free, yet more complex, so bear repeated listening. According to the liner notes they “began life as layers of recorded improvisations on a simple little stylophone and a small cheap MIDI synth, which were then written over with notation and orchestrated for a live band of drums, saxophone, guitar and trombone, electronics and tape elements”. They evoke images of an anarchic opera, samples from TV and film adding to this rich and borderline frantic mêlé. Though I’m unaware of Paxton’s influences, many other associations were triggered, Sun Ra Arkestra and Anna Meredith being perhaps the most prominent, whilst in the visual art world and particularly in the nightmarish Prayer In The Darkness, Hieronymus Bosch of course.

This album is cutting-edge neo-classical with more than a touch of downtown New York-style jazz improvisation and, what’s more, it’s tremendous fun, so it comes as no surprise to hear that Paxton has recently received the compliment of a commission from US multi-instrumentalist John Zorn.

Alex Paxton – Music For Bosch People
(Birmingham Record Company BRC011. Album review by Fiona Mactaggart)

Amazon

Uniquely and audaciously manic. Call an ambulance, just in case.This is one of the naughtiest CDs to come my way in some time, and I am glad of it. Alex Paxton (b. 1990) is a British composer and improvising jazz trombonist. He is, perhaps, to the trombone with Frank Zappa was to the electric guitar, and at first listen, he shares at least some of Zappa's creativity, and his talent for pushing his music as far as it can go without teetering it into anarchy. The other composer whom I am reminded of is Gene Pritsker.

But let's let Paxton speak for himself:
"Like minimal but loads more notes like video-games but with more song like jazz but much more gay like old gay music but more current like yummy sweet but more stick like paint but more scratch like tapestry but filthily like prayer but more loud like loud groove and more rude like fingers and faces too but somehow more smelly like smelly things cooking with more chew and change like louder prayers that groove with like stinking-hot-pink in poo-brown but even more desperate-like than that like drums and Dream Musics…"

Granted, one might call that childish and self-serving, but Paxton and his colleagues obviously are having tons of fun on this CD, and it's contagious. Some of the seven selections start relatively calmly ("Prayer in the Darkness" is almost pastoral at the outset), but all of them turn hypermanic in short order. Ideas are thrown against the wall with machine gun rapidity, and they go splat all over the listener, no matter how adept he or she is ducking. Paxton is inspired, it seems, not just by video game music, but also by video games (older ones, perhaps) themselves. In the middle of the musicians' impressive technical accomplishments, there runs a low-tech charm that I find appealing. At times the music resembles nothing less than the screaming of a band of frenzied chimpanzees (or Donkey Kong?) and a ruthless attack on a city skyline executed by the Super Mario Bros. If I'm speaking Greek, ask your (grand)kids. (Incidentally, Paxton has worked extensively with young people. His opera "Noggin and the Whale" involves “massed forces including 500 young instrumentalists and singers.”)

Some readers might have grown up with Charlie Brown television specials, and if they did, they probably remember the wordless “wah-wah” voice of Charlie Brown's teacher, Miss Othmar. That sound was created by trombonist Dean Hubbard. Miss Othmar's descendants are part of Alex Paxton's world too, and their inarticulate nagging becomes another component of his eclectic sound-mix. And oh yes, can we talk? One really can pick out the voice of Joan Rivers in the fourth track.

This CD is relentless, and it is fortunate that it is relatively short. I don't know that I could take much more, but that's not to say that I did not enjoy every second of it. It's like bring tied down and tickled ruthlessly by a gang of nerds...not that I would know.

AMAZON top USA review

Utterly exhilirating. Totally missed this release until Seth Colter Walls covered it in the New York Times. In a word: wow. Alex Paxton combines elements of musique concrete, collective free-form jazz improv, and loads of humor and satire. Not much can prepare one for this music. The only comparison I might make is to Lumpy Gravy-era Frank Zappa.

For those looking to stretch their ears, consider this atomic yoga. Turn it up.

pleasure in a fallen world...