Matter of sax: Jess Gillam on her career so far

This article first appeared in the March 2019 edition of Classical Music. 

Happily, Gillam made this particular decision for me the day before our interview by writing an open letter to the Guardian arguing for music to be treated as a core subject in schools. ‘Music is part of the fabric of our society,' she reasoned. ‘It sits at the heart of human experience and enriches so many lives. Why, then, is it not central to our education system?’

So there it was, then: access to music. Indeed, what ended up shining out over the course of our ensuing conversation was the degree to which access to music, and its power to enrich lives, really is the central plank to everything Gillam both does and is.

‘Music education is something I feel passionately about anyway,' she confirms, ‘and I feel as though whenever opportunities arise to talk about it then I have to take them. So with my album release coming up, and the subject building momentum now in the press. It does seem increasingly as though we’re reaching a saxophone, all with completely free group tuition. So I picked up a saxophone when I was seven and never looked back.'

The funding for the centre has now been cut, along with the funding for the primary tuition scheme which she benefited from at her local primary school. ‘Students at the secondary school would teach the younger students at the primary school,' she explains.

‘Lessons were £2 a week, and it was brilliant because the people teaching were learning and consolidating their knowledge, while the younger students were learning at a discounted price.

‘There was cheap instrument hire too. So I went on this scheme, and while still at primary school was playing in the secondary school bands.'

The issue is especially pertinent for Gillam. Not simply because these days she’s a patron of the charity Awards for Young Musicians, which identifies and supports musical talent from deprived backgrounds; or because she always tries to tie in a school visit to a concert (‘Even if just to play a piece to an assembly, as sometimes that’s all it takes to ignite a spark’); but because, as she reminds everyone in her letter, it was through two music programmes near her hometown of Ulverston near the Lake District that she discovered the saxophone.

‘It was actually in a community carnival centre,' she explains, ‘the Barracudas Carnival Arts Centre in Barrow-in-Furness. My dad, who had been in an Indie rock band when he was younger, was teaching percussion there, so I used to go to work with him twice a week after school.'

What’s especially interesting about Gillam’s musical beginnings for those of us in the industry frustrated at the lack of classical-specific school provision is that her entry wasn’t through classical at all. ‘In the carnival band we played pop tunes and samba-inspired music,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t classical. Then when I started the primary tuition scheme, from the age of about ten or 11, I did ABRSM grade exams. Probably the first time I really heard classical saxophone was when my mum and dad took me to a concert by the Absolution Saxophone Quartet for my 11th birthday, and I was just completely transfixed. I’d never heard the instrument being played in this way. So I got chatting to the members afterwards, and then began lessons with one of them in Salford. Then, at her suggestion, I joined the Junior Royal Northern College of Music. This was just after I’d done my Grade 7, and during my first year there I did my Grade 8.'

Gillam entered the academy on an ABRSM scholarship bequeathed each year to one of its auditionees.

‘Oh, I lived for Saturday!’ she enthuses. ‘To be surrounded by like-minded young musicians. We had our individual lessons, but we would then play in ensembles and have theory and composition. It was a very rounded music education. Also a very classical-based course, and while by this point I’d been playing classical music and had been listening to it – my mum and dad play it for the customers in the tea rooms they run, for instance – it wasn’t something that I’d really explored; and I’d kind of not realised how much of it there was, and the history behind it, and how powerful it was.'

Further inspiration came when she reached the senior college, where ABRSM scholars receive £6,000 which they can put towards anything they want. ‘I used mine for lessons in Canterbury with John Harle,’ she says, ‘and for me he has been one of the most important collaborations so far. It is such an honour to be an ABRSM scholar. It is such an important institution in music education.’

It was also at RNCM that she found out about BBC Young Musician and applied; first in 2014, when she got through to the woodwind category final, and then in 2016, when she won the category. The rest, of course, is history: a Decca recording contract, a performance at the 2017 BBC Proms followed by Last Night of the 2018 BBC Proms (‘It may have been September, but it’s only recently sunk in that this is something that I’ve done! The Proms is such an amazing festival. The atmosphere and electricity when you walk out onstage. We’re so lucky to have it in this country’), and now the burgeoning of an international performing career whose recent dates include performing John Williams and John Harle with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, being a WQXR 2019 ‘One to Watch’ artist, and her debut in Washington DC.

Closer to home, Gillam is back at the Royal Albert Hall in April to perform alongside guitarist Sean Shibe and soprano Lauren Fagen in their Rising Stars of Classical concert, and also to take part in a schools concert there organised by the local tri-borough music hub.

Then there’s that debut album, Rise, which presents exactly the sort of multigenre programme you’d expect from a background such as Gillam’s: everything from Kate Bush’s ballad This Woman’s Work through to an arrangement of John Dowland ’s Flow My Tears for which she’s accompanied by guitarist Miloš, to a new commission by John Harle based on folk songs from her home county for which she’s joined by the BBC Concert Orchestra.

The album opener meanwhile is Pedro Iturralde’s lively Hungarian folksong inspired Pequeña Czarda: a work that’s become a bit of a signature tune after she performed it in the 2016 BBC Young Musician category final, and also one which, together with that Harle commission, brings us neatly full circle back to both her home town and to education; because as we finish our chat she describes a concert she did recently for 400 Ulverston primary school children in the local hall.

‘I started promoting concerts there when I was 12, and it’s something that I continue to do,’ she says. ‘We’re able to access so much music now so easily; just click a button and you can listen to almost anything. However, live music is something that young people don’t necessarily experience, especially as far up the country as Ulverston.

‘Yet I think it’s the one thing that can capture them, it’s just so engaging and special. For this particular concert I played Pequeña Czarda as my final piece, and this room of seven to 11-year-olds just stood up and clapped, danced, jumped and span around for the whole thing.

‘Then when we got to the end they cheered for about two minutes straight, and went away saying, “We want to learn this for ourselves!” I’ve got the video of it, and it’s the most memorable school concert I’ve done.’

This may be a telephone interview, but Gillam and I don’t need to be face to face for me to feel her enduring pleasure at this memory. In fact it’s clear that the UK has an infectious new champion for spreading the word about the life-enriching power of music. Multi-genre music, no less.