HANDS across the North Sea time again, as one of Scotland's leading jazzers, saxophonist Laura MacDonald, joins forces with the distinguished Swedish drummer Martina Almgren for an impressive new album and a trio of Scottish gigs with that rare anomaly, a jazz line-up comprising 50 per cent women.
The collaboration was sparked off by the Jazz From Sweden festival, organised this time last year by Assembly Direct with the Swedish Rikskonserter agency. This invasion of Nordic jazzers offered MacDonald the chance of gigging with the Gothenburg-ba
sed Almgren, whose quartet is an established presence on the vigorous Swedish jazz scene. "Basically," she explains, "we formed a group with Aidan O'Donnell on bass and Paul Harrison on piano. It was all quite rushed… but the odd thing was that her tunes really gelled with mine."
The three Scots rode this wave of creative empathy on a Swedish tour with Almgren, occupying a Gothenburg studio to record Open Book, an album of sinuous, warm-toned jazz, with leeway for O'Donnell's bass, Harrison's piano, MacDonald's mellifluous sax lines and Almgren's restrained but constantly shifting drum patterns. MacDonald pronounces herself well pleased with the result: "You're never that comfortable listening to yourself," she laughs, "but this one, I really like.
"I suppose it's leaning more towards European jazz than straight-ahead American swing. It's really melodic."
Audiences in Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews can judge for themselves over the next week, but, on a mundane level, there is a certain novelty in a jazz quartet boasting two women – and neither of them singers.
The continuing male-dominance of the genre, instrumentally at any rate, is something MacDonald could be heard discussing with singer and presenter Claire Martin on BBC Radio 3's Jazz Line Up recently. "There are a lot of great women musicians out there," says MacDonald, "but to be honest, among the people I'm dealing with, I'm still generally the only one. It's a huge novelty factor to be playing with another woman in the band."
The imbalance remains a mystery to her: "I do a lot of education work, and I've brought on a lot of really good saxophone players who are girls, but for some reason, they just don't see it through to the end. Whether they just give it up or go off and get married or something… I don't know."
MacDonald, who was playing lead alto in the Strathclyde Youth Jazz Orchestra when she was just 18, sounds baffled. Now 33 and based in south Lanarkshire, she has played with the best of them since she graduated from Boston's Berklee College of Music in 1997, including George Russell, Carla Bley, Arturo Sandoval, Bobby Watson, Joe Lovano and her former husband Tommy Smith. At Berklee, she says, she'd sometimes be greeted with hilarity if she asked to sit in on a session. "Word soon gets around that you can play, but it was a bit of a battle initially."
Later this year, her ship comes in, as it were, when she joins the New York swing maestro Ken Poplowski (whom she met at the Islay Jazz Festival) and a big band for a Caribbean jazz cruise – "I can do these kind of gigs no problem," she chuckles. Once again, though, she'll probably be the only female instrumentalist in the band, not to mention the only Scot.
Hitting the road with Almgren, however, may do a little to redress the balance.
&149 Open Book is released on the Imogena label this month. MacDonald and Almgren play The Lot, Edinburgh, 6 February; City Halls, Glasgow, 7 February, and the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, 9 February.
