Mark Pringle - Book of Haikus (2019)

This album marks the end of two years studying around Europe between 2015 and 2017. The project was born of a desire to bring together all my favourite musicians from each of the cities I had lived in. Jonas Engel (saxophone) from Copenhagen, Tristan Renfrow (drums) from Amsterdam, Arne Braun (guitar) and James Banner (double bass) from Berlin. Over one weekend in 2017 we met and intensively rehearsed the music, performed and recorded, mostly in single takes. This put us on our toes, and I think the music comes across the better for that.

The compositions took inspiration from haiku poems by American author Jack Kerouac. I felt drawn to their freedom of form (they do not follow fixed syllable patterns) and the imagery they depicted. I began seeing numerous parallels between the idea of a musical sketch and a haiku, most notably an intent to communicate a meaning greater than the concise amount of material on the page. With this in mind I began writing musical sketches, coming up with seeds for composition that sometimes grew into longer forms, and othertimes stayed as minimal sketches which eventually served as jumping off points for improvisation.