Jack Wyllie, a composer, multi‑instrumentalist, and co-founder of the Mercury Prize–nominated Portico Quartet, debuts under his own name.
The album radiates hope, mirroring nature s beauty and cyclical rhythms while weaving through contemporary jazz, ambient, classical, and post‑rock.
Collaborators include Hania Rani and Duncan Bellamy.
Jack Wyllie, saxophonist, flautist and composer, is perhaps best known as the co-founder of Mercury Prize nominated wide-screen minimalists Portico Quartet and as 1/3 of revelatory, ambient improvising trio Szun
Waves, but his distinctive voice on flute, soprano and tenor saxophones marks him out as a key figure in contemporary music. A keen collaborator whose projects have drawn on ambient, Fourth-world, electronica and
modern classical influences, Eternal Spring is the first recording under his own name.
Eternal Spring, which features collaborators as diverse as erstwhile Portico Quartet band mates drummer Duncan Bellamy and bassist Milo Fitzpatrick, iconoclastic Polish artist Hania Rani, cellist Dobrawa Czocher and Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean, draws inspiration from both Wyllie’s love of verdant nature but also the idea of a constant, flickering sense of hope and his compositions balance elevating melodies and cyclical rhythms while unashamedly reaching for something hopeful and beautiful.
Shimmering, rippling, budding and blossoming, though still appealingly familiar, it’s clear that with Eternal Spring Wyllie has crafted one of those rare records that reveal the magic all around us by removing us from our circumstances.
Whether welcoming a new day or painting night skies, Eternal Spring celebrates life as well as its cyclical nature. Indeed, this music not only demanded the title for itself, but also demanded Wyllie use his given name. “I realised I’m ready to own it,” he adds. As likely to provoke references to ambient and jazz as classical and even post-rock, what unites it is an essential, bucolic sense of renewal and replenishment.
That, and a willing embrace of multiple touchstones, from John Adams to John Surman, from Ryuichi Sakamoto to James Holden. He even acknowledges Keith Jarret’s Arbour Zena, recorded with Jan Garbarek and Charlie Haden, as well as a kinship with South Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s serene Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring.
Having mapped out his compositions with pianos and synths, Wyllie conspired on their nascent rhythms with Portico Quartet drummer Duncan
Bellamy, finding peace in his restorative intentions before expanding into sessions at a church, Saint Thomas Clapton, another at Max Richter’s Studio Richter Mahr, and a final day at London’s Fish Factory. . “It was like I’d found a natural space between all my projects,” he says, “something I could hone in on.”
This then is Eternal Spring, where wonders will never cease. But it’s also Jack Wyllie’s first solo album. He’s proud to put his name to it.