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Music

‘What excites me is people making a noise’

Composer Sam Eastmond's latest piece explores what it is to be British and Jewish

September 26, 2019 11:25
Sam Eastmond

By

Keren David,

Keren David

4 min read

Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl is playing in the background of the café where I’ve arranged to meet composer Sam Eastmond. Sheeran, followed by Taylor Swift. It couldn’t really be more incongruous. Eastmond’s music is the complete antithesis of this soft commercial pop.

If listening to Sheeran is the musical equivalent of having a warm, scented bath, then Eastmond’s big band sound is like being woken up at 5am by someone chucking ice cold water in your face. It’s unexpected, it’s challenging, and it’s not always comfortable. But it certainly gets your attention, and makes you feel more awake than you’ve been for years.

“What excites me,” he says, “is lots of people making a noise. Lots of people communicating. What I’m trying to do is blurring the lines between orchestrating and improvisation, making the improvisation part of the organic foundation of the writing.”

If that baffles you, then think of Eastmond’s musical inspiration as a Friday night dinner with everyone talking at once. He keeps a purple diamanté skull on his desk, to have someone to talk to when he is composing. His wife, who is not Jewish, was baffled when she first observed him with his mother. “She’d ask ‘Why are you always shouting at eachother?’ I’d say ‘We’re not shouting!’” For the first four years of marriage she couldn’t bear his favourite show, Curb Your Enthusiasm. “She just didn’t get it. ‘It’s just Jewish people shouting at eachother’” Luckily, she persevered.