‘Standing in front of an orchestra, the vibration blows me away,’ declares saxophonist, composer and improviser Ingrid Laubrock. ‘There’s such a huge amount of colour to play with. It’s just beautiful.’ Laubrock will be drawing on the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s palette of tones at Tectonics, with the delayed UK premiere of her composition ‘Drilling’. 

^{Ingrid Laubrock/Picture: Helmut-Berns}

Laubrock was due to perform the piece at 2020’s edition of Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell’s cutting-edge new music festival, only for covid to intervene. Three years on, she’s excited to finally be working with conductor Volkov and the BBC SSO, one of the world’s most adventurous orchestras. ‘I think what he’s doing is amazing,’ she notes. ‘I fully trust him.’

Laubrock’s place at the forefront of a new generation of composers and improvisers dissolving the artificial barriers between avant-garde jazz and classical music makes her a perfect fit for Tectonics. Born in Germany, Laubrock cut her teeth on the millennial London jazz scene as a member of the forward-thinking F-IRE Collective.

Since relocating to New York in 2009 she has established herself as a leading figure in the creative music scene, collaborating with such luminaries as Anthony Braxton, Myra Melford, Mary Halvorson and George E Lewis, while also leading her own projects. These range from duos with her husband, drummer Tom Rainey, to large-scale orchestral pieces. Attending a workshop in 2012 led by Lewis (a key figure in Chicago’s pioneering Association For The Advancement Of Creative Musicians and a regular guest of Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra) helped Laubrock develop an approach to orchestral composition informed by her experience as an improviser.

^{Ingrid Laubrock/Picture: Peter Gannushkin}

‘I realised that with the right people or the right conductor, you can actually figure out ways of making it more my language or where I’m coming from,’ she notes, ‘rather than completely trying to invent myself into an orchestral composer.’ 

Commissioned by Cologne’s EOS Chamber Orchestra, ‘Drilling’ first appeared on Laubrock’s 2020 album Dreamt Twice, Twice Dreamt in small group and orchestral versions. Based on her dreams, the piece develops slowly, with soloists weaving improvised parts around relatively static blocks of sound from the orchestra. For Tectonics, two of the soloists on that recorded version (pianist Cory Smythe and Laubrock herself) will be joined by Scottish electronic musician Adam Linson.

‘The electronics manipulate the orchestra in that piece’s first half,’ Laubrock explains. ‘It’s a very calm, very thinly orchestrated piece that the electronics bend and detune. So there’s this sense of destabilisation, but on a very subtle level.’ Smythe’s quarter-tone piano adds a further layer of disorientation. ‘It’s kind of disconcerting for the orchestra,’ Laubrock laughs, ‘because it makes them sound out of tune.’

Ingrid Laubrock appears at Tectonics with BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, City Halls, Glasgow, Sunday 30 April.