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SEE YOU AT JAZZAHEAD 2025 at the SCOTLAND STAND

***PRESS RELEASE***

Tom Lyne is a leading figure on the Scottish jazz scene with an impressively diverse portfolio. Double and electric bassist, producer and sound designer, he is also a composer. Lyne’s new album Well Mixed Blue is a celebration of his longstanding musical partnership with pianist Dave Milligan, which is built on the strong, intuitive chemistry between the two men as well as their strengths as individual players. “He’s a dear friend and I adore his piano playing,” says Lyne. “We’ve improvised together a lot. You need good songs, but improvisation is the art of conversation. There’s a lot of humour and invention when we play because we’re going back and forth with ideas.” Lyne, who has been a member of Milligan’s trio for many years, had decided to dedicate himself comprehensively to the double bass during the pandemic, so he decided to stick to a strict, intensive practice regime, and realized that a duo with Milligan would be the perfect outlet for his new energy.

There are previous references to the music. Lyne was greatly inspired by the legendary partnership of singer Sheila Jordan and bassist Harvey S and a collaboration Lyne has had with singer Sophie Bancroft for more than 25 years, during which time they have recorded eight CDs and performed all over the UK, Holland. Canada and the U.S. Their work together has been instrumental to Lyne’s development. Arranging songs and lyrics enable him to build a personal sound world. “One of the things that interests me is the way harmony works,” he explains. “I think of it as textures and tensions, and all the relationships of these tensions to each other rather than a definite tonality. So a pianist will ask, ‘where is the key?’ Sometimes there isn’t one, I guess my brain responds to complicated harmonies and rhythms.”

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Lyne, who played violin at the age of three and went on to study double bass at McGill University in Montreal, has been living in Scotland since 1998. He has played with the country’s leading jazz artists such as Dave Milligan, Brian Kellock, Tom Bancroft, and Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, but also maintains a great love of rock and pop pioneers, such as Rush and Thomas Dolby.

Lyne thus has a broad palette of influences on which to draw, and Well Mixed Blue is like a collection of fine short stories in sound, moving from contemplative pieces such as ‘Sea More’, written while looking at the ocean, to a playful stroll through David Sanborn’s 80s fusion favourite ‘Run For Cover’ to the quietly poetic ‘Holding On.’

The title track of Well Mixed Blue makes an oblique reference to Money Jungle, the historic 1962 collaboration between Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach, but true to form Lyne and Milligan put an adventurous stamp on proceedings. “There’s a tune on the album called ‘Backwards Country Boy Blues’, one of the best on the record,” Lyne says. “We have a little bit of an interpretation of that, but we’re shoehorning in some Coltrane type changes just to make it a bit more uncomfortable, and interesting.” That imagination defines the album. With its wide range of material, from understated themes to boisterous bass-piano unison melodies, hearty riffs and rousing, vivid improvisation, Well Mixed Blue places no limits on the emotional journey of a song. “I get attracted to whatever sounds good,” Lyne notes. “A tune can be the emotional state of feeling blue, which I don’t see as a negative place to be. It’s introspective, thoughtful, generous, and you can be aware of things around you. And my passion for that drives original songs and related improvisation.”
written by Kevin Le Gendre