THE south London saxophonist and flautist, Tori Freestone, comes from a long line of Thames watermen going back to the 18th century. Her father is an ex-merchant seaman and lover of marine folk songs and shanties.

She speaks proudly of her great uncle on her mother’s side, the Welsh-born miner, trade unionist and communist, Idris Williams — Somme veteran and one-time member of the Mountain Ash male voice choir, who emigrated to Wonthaggi, Australia in 1920, and led the historic five month miners’ strike in 1934, while also being an active choral singer, brass band conductor and chair of the Miners Union theatre: an astonishing all-rounder. “He travelled around Australia with my grandfather Thomas, performing in community centres,” says Tori.

As a girl she grew up singing and playing flute and violin alongside her sister and guitar and harmonica-playing father in a succession of folk song parties with visiting seamen’s families and performances in folk clubs, working men’s clubs and care homes. “It was a full-on musical childhood,” she says: “music was everywhere.”

She remembers meeting and being given a signed photo of the great French violinist Stephane Grappelli when she was seven, and buying her first jazz album by Weather Report, which together with her dad’s Joni Mitchell records featuring him, started a lifelong love for the great saxophonist Wayne Shorter. She also credits the summer schools organised by Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine at their Wavendon home, for provoking her jazz enthusiasm.

Leaving school, she went to Leeds College of Music and later to the Guildhall, where she was tutored by the great tenor saxophonist, Stan Sulzmann.

Her new, fifth album is Make One Little Room an Everywhere, inspired by the line in John Donne’s 1634 poem, The Good Morrow.

Her album partner is the Dorset-born pianist, Alcyona Mick, whose ancestors were also Thames watermen. This is their second duo album — the first, Criss Cross, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQBJuSokN0E, was created out of their mutual love for Thelonious Monk. “I love Alcyona’s sense of time, her great ears and the power of her rhythmic language. We can be musically playful together, and her quirky, witty, angular style soaks up many different aspects, particularly Monk.”

To me Tori’s shamanic, folk-nurtured sound reminds me of the tenor saxophone timbre of Charles Lloyd, and her floating, strongly buoyant tone is unlike that of any other British saxophonist: “But I play with a British accent,” she declares, “inspired by other English saxophonists like Stan Sulzmann, Iain Bellamy, Julian Arguelles and the great Scot, Bobby Wellins.”

She believes that playing flute first meant that she “took from the flute and incorporated it into the tenor sax, which is a very oral instrument. I think of the saxophone in a very vocal way.”

Which is one reason that compels her to add voices to her recordings. On previous albums she has sung folk ballads herself like Press Gang and Shenandoah. On this new album Brigitte Beraha sings a beautifully tender version of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7cXBmRdXq0, and the Belgian/Egyptian vocalist Natacha Atlas forges a wordless vocal on Tori's tune Who We Are Now, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isPSLfVfISI, which she says reflects the isolation and “lack of connection” she felt during lockdown. “I wanted to create a unity with the world,” remembering with Donne that no human is an island, but we are all “part of the main”.

I told her that although it was composed during lockdown, I heard it as a lamentation for the people of Gaza. “I’m not surprised,” said Tori, “its long notes — inspired by chanting ‘om’ in yoga — create a sense of suppression, and Natacha is a long-time active supporter of the Palestinian cause. I heard her voice in my head as I was writing it.”

Saxophone, piano and voice all seem to coalesce, as if it were — as of course, it is — the same humanity creating music as one.

“Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,” wrote Donne, and like her ancestors, Tori is a seafarer, but a seafarer of the saxophone. One of her future projects is to bring into jazz the sea songs and shanties of those who came before.

I for one, am eager to hear that, but in the meantime make your own front room an everywhere by getting hold of Tori and Alcyona’s new album, and playing it time and time again.

Make One Little Room an Everywhere is released by MTO Records