AN OUTSTANDINGLY original saxophonist and improviser is Phil Hargreaves, whose new album Pi with vocalist Maggie Nicols (together they are Siapiau), is living and timbral proof of that.

He is also a vice-president of the Workers’ Music Association, so music is only one expression of his love of freedom, although as he says: “the beauty of improvisation is, that at its best, it creates something perfectly fitted to the moment it was created.”

Born in Leeds in 1959, his mother, a primary school teacher who played piano and violin, his father a mining engineer, music was certainly in the house. “As a teenager,” he says, “I loved rock — Black Sabbath, Bowie etc., and then I embraced punk as soon as it came out. I got my first saxophone after I moved to Liverpool, aged 21.

“I wasn’t sure how it should be played, so I went to the second-hand record shop round the corner and just bought records with saxophones in them — Roland Kirk and Coltrane, then later expanded my listening to the likes of Evan Parker and Anthony Braxton.”

He said he wasn’t sure how to define “professional”. “I’ve never earned much money playing music, but I’ve not been doing anything else since about 1982. I played with a pop band called Personal Column, but I’ve always liked improvisation — I even did some with my teenage punk band, but my big leap into it was when myself and Phil Morton launched Frakture in 1997. I’ve never looked back since then.”

What about his longstanding musical bond with Maggie Nicols? 

“I first played with Maggie when she came to Liverpool to play with the Frakture Big Band in 2002. In 2007 I went down to her place in Wales.” Their first joint album, Human, uses motif of a mill stream to run through it, and emerged from recordings made in 2008 — 10. Pi has less emphasis on environmental elements. Recorded at Nicols’s house, “... we were more comfortable there than in a recording studio. The etymology of the word ‘conspiracy’ is to breathe together. That’s not a bad description of that weekend we spent recording the album.”

With Hargreaves and Nicols are percussionist Richard Harrison and bassist Fran Bass. Pi itself seems to have serendipitous beginnings. ”Maggie has a Kurt Schwitters poem in her kitchen. Under it was a printout of Pi to just over a thousand decimal places. Maggie read the poem and started on the digits. Next day she read them again and we added backing vocals. So I couldn't say we set out to search for meaning in either geometry or mathematics.”

As for Bass and Harrison, Hargreaves knows that “they are superlative musicians with sensitive and generous ears. I’m constantly astonished by what they do. They’d both be a lot better known if they lived in London.”

How much structure is there in the album? 

“There are structured pieces like October Butterflies and Music by Hands, but mostly we start from exactly nothing, until one of us ventures to break the silence. The shape of the music is something we negotiate as we go along.” Not for nothing is “siapiau” the Welsh word for “shapes.”

“Of course, there are various stories in the album’s sounds. Stories are massively important. The world is huge and incredibly hard to understand and it’s only our stories that render it comprehensible. We need our poets!”

The album is balanced on the edge of sounds. Yet the more sounds that are created, the less on the edge they become and soon the listener realises they are mainstream human — heard in the street, in the air, around the house, in the weather, in the bathroom pipes, car sounds on the road outside, birdsong and insect sounds from the bushes and trees.

Siapiau tell us that all these sounds are ours, are human, consciously or subconsciously heard and absorbed by us, and felt, seen and heard by all of us, becoming a part of their worlds too. Through this creation, as Nicols tells us in October Butterflies, it is music and musicians that “lead us to beauty.”
    
And what about his connection to the Workers’ Music Association? 

“In 1988 I attended its Summer School as a very green apprentice jazz player. It had a tremendous effect on me and what I learned that week took me several months to process.”

He became a WMA jazz tutor 15 years ago and then a vice-president, contributing also to the digitising of the WMA archive. A proud and modest jazz revolutionary, he’s a living example of how music which discovers also builds love and union. 

Listen to Pi and discover for yourselves.
    
PI with Maggie Nicols is released by Discus Music