Imaginary Gardens is a collaboration between Alex Trask and Jake Baxendale, two local saxophonists and composers. Together they will present music from their projects ‘Imaginary Folksongs’ and ‘Gardening Music’. They have in common a love for nature, exploration, and collective music making that forms the basis of both projects.

Alex Trask’s ‘Imaginary Folksongs’ blends Earth folk music with a speculative style from an imaginary place. Inspired by bluegrass, Scottish folk music, and jazz performance practice, the tunes have a simplicity in common. Free improvised sections contrast carefully arranged melodies, allowing creativity and structure to coexist. The fiddle-esque melodies and straightforward harmonies create an open and inviting sound that changes depending on the musicians on stage. Performing this music as a group invites each member to paint their private imaginings, creating a unique collective folklore.

Jake Baxendale's ‘Gardening Music’ is inspired by his combined love of the natural world and writings on environmental humanities by authors such as Robin Wall-Kimmerer, Anna Tsing and Ursula K Le Guin. The music evokes images of soft rain, digging soil and leaves blowing in the wind, while ideas around interspecies entanglement, along with Baxendale's lifelong quest to explore the synthesis between composition and improvisation, have given rise to sprawling polyphonic assemblages. These compositions are designed to upend conventional roles of both the music and the musicians playing it: each phrase chosen almost at random, mixing initial statements with concluding statements, blurring the notion of beginning & ending, melody & accompaniment, denying hierarchy and creating an indeterminate middle. This is the present in which we must exist, and that must be reflected in the stories we tell.

Tickets at UTR