With her third album, composer and bandleader Jasmine Myra has stepped confidently into the next stage of her unique musical explorations. Where Light Settles is a cohesive artistic statement from a distinctive and confident voice in UK music, and a significant evolution from the critically acclaimed Horizons (2022) and Rising (2024).
Nine beautiful and powerfully grounded compositions express an accumulation of the artist’s ruminations on life, growth, and progression, powered by her vision of duality. “It’s those bittersweet moments which are heart-breaking but so important. Looking forward and trying to make sense of life,” she says. “Pain is unavoidable, and you’ll have hardship no matter what, but you don’t grow or learn about yourself or the world around you without it. The duality is the growth and coming out the other side. I had the concept from the start.”
Jasmine Myra’s verdant musical vision and talent for instrumental storytelling came to life over five days, with her long-standing ensemble gathering in one room at The Nave studios in Leeds.
was all recorded in the same room. This album is so much about energy. We had to be able to see each other. The musicians really serve the music, working together to create what I envisioned.”
Myra had crossed paths with Ancient Infinity Orchestra bandleader Ozzy Moysey before she moved from Leeds to London, often attending and playing at the same jam sessions. This made him the perfect choice to conduct the 15-piece band, freeing her up to bring maximum tenderness and elegiac tones to the alto sax lines she’d written. Her own playing sits deliberately within each track, never flying above. Instead, it wraps gently around precision melodies she wrote for strings, piano, flute, guitar, vibraphone, and harp which themselves furl and unfurl gorgeously around tenor sax, double bass, drums, and percussion. It’s a huge undertaking, executed with resolute confidence, and melodies that sparkle like sunlight on water.
As well as writing all the music, Where Light Settles is also her first self-produced record, with Gondwana label boss Matthew Halsall undertaking Contributing Producer duties. It’s a colourful sound world, shaped in both atmosphere and structure by Myra’s affinity with music for film.
“My music is quite cinematic because I’ve always liked listening to soundtracks – how emotive it is, how music causes us to feel a certain way,” she says, citing US composer Dustin O’Halloran, Wes Anderson soundtracks (“they’re so cheeky and playful and endearing”) and Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for Interstellar. Soundtracks, she says, have weaved their way into the music.
Behind the notes and staves there’s also Myra’s love of nature, specifically regular trips to North Wales, the Lake District, and the South Downs. “I just love those landscapes. It’s the duality: nature can be brutal but beautiful and I love that juxtaposition.” And of course, existing musical influences that range from Fabiano do Nascimento to Arooj Aftab and Alabaster Deplume.
It begins, though, with ‘Opening’; gem-like piano setting the musical and emotional tone. It was her first time writing for strings and they bring exquisite depth to ‘Likeness and Shadow’ – the title inspired by a Walt Whitman poem. The feeing evoked by her harp lines is, she says, ‘like standing on a cliff, overlooking the sea, on a really windy day.’ Light, magical percussion sits intentionally underneath cleverly paired instruments – for example the flute and alto flute flying fantastically around the top of earthy cello and viola.
“I try to explain music as like a temperature or a season. This album is autumnal. On ‘Some Rain Must Fall’ my drummer is doing a very free, light thing, and that’s meant to be textural: dry sounds, leaves falling to the ground. It’s been fun playing with that.”
Myra’s artistic vision brought contemporary folk into the fold, with her love of artists including Flyte and Madison Cunningham filtering into ‘Echo’. The music forms a constellation adjacent to new Scottish jazz artists using the natural world as inspiration, say Fergus McCreadie, or Matt Carmichael, with the latter contributing tenor sax on the glittering ‘In An Instant’. And at the end, the title track channels the warmest of energies, bringing the orbit of this phenomenal music to a close.
“Where Light Settles is a metaphor for hope, and for me, it’s the perfect title for this album, which we recorded together, in person. It communicates the energy and the meaning behind it – and it ties in with the theme of duality.”
Last year brought success and promise, including an inspiring two-date trip to China. This summer and autumn, and the months that roll out in the distance, will be all about spreading the word. Those who know already love Jasmine Myra’s music. And soon, everyone else will too.
