“I NEVER considered that I wouldn’t play piano or trumpet or lead a band,” Laura Jurd asserts. That, she believes, was due to the dynamism of her teachers, remarkable women who, from the age of five onwards, gave her the confidence and self-belief to achieve.

Now in her twenties, she went on to study classical piano as a teenager, with Stravinsky, Bach, Britten and Tippett all making a profound impact, while Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Charlie Mingus, Duke Ellington and Keith Jarrett were an influence from the US jazz lineage.

Her track record for one so young is hugely impressive. A regular performer in Britain and Europe, she leads the 2017 Mercury-nominated band Dinosaur and is a prolific composer who’s equally at home writing for contemporary chamber groups and orchestras as she is writing for jazz ensemble and improvising musicians.

A passionate educator, she teaches jazz at London’s Goldmiths University  and is a professor of composition, while also finding time to co-lead the Trinity Laban Jazz Orchestra and work with the National Youth Jazz Collective.

Her new record Stepping Back, Jumping In, with three others contributing to the compositions, is a powerful expression of this eclecticism. Opener Jumping In features the brilliant Rob Luft on banjo and while “the Americana is there, the harmonies come from listening to Stravinsky. I love his intuitive approach to composing. There’s a primal sound in his music.”

That's true of Jurd’s compositions too and in her Jump Cut Shuffle with the Ligeli String Quartet she borrows phrases from Ellington’s Queen Suite.

The album is absolutely an ensemble experience, with an irrepressible sense of collectivism and the excitation of youth and discovery and Jurd loves the cosmopolitanism her music generates.

At the centre of I Am the Spring, You Are the Earth is the santor, played by Iranian virtuoso Soosan Lolavor and for the recording of Companion Species, pianist and composer Anja Lauvdal arrived from Oslo to participate.

But at the nucleus of her music are her bandmates from the Dinosaur group — bassist Conor Chaplin, drummer Corrie Dick and pianist and composer Elliot Galvin — who have been with her for a decade.  

“Elliot is like me,” she says. “He loves both jazz and classical music. But all three have been huge influences, as much as Ellington and Miles. We spend so much time together shaping changes and  interpreting our music.”

The collective nature of music can be an alternative vision of hope and progress in backward times because it “always expresses something positive in humanity,” she asserts.

“It shows us how we are as humans — the good  and the bad bits. I don’t think there are many people on this planet who aren’t affected by music. It demonstrates how we can share our lives in a deeply collective way and makes us reflect and ask questions. It is that powerful.”
 
She sees jazz as such a reflection, as well as a driver of the progress women have made over the last decade: “Although there are still remnants within the music of a less equal past that are still present, among jazz musicians are some of the most progressive people I know.”

Stepping Back, Jumping In is an apt expression of those sentiments. Jurd’s virtuosity and her skills in creating music with her friends and her powerful optimism are all there as her trumpet rings out on tracks like Companion Species and Stepping Back.

She sounds like the herald of a full-on future.

Stepping Back, Jumping In is released on Edition Records.