Saxophonist Martin Kershaw has used his fascination with the work of Eduardo Paolozzi to travel in a new musical direction. By Rob Adams.

What might a sculptor, a chamber music group and a rock band have in common? Their examples have been responsible for saxophonist Martin Kershaw spending much of 2008 locked away with a piano, a computer programme and a sheaf of manuscript paper.

Kershaw, one-third of creative jazz hooligans Trianglehead and a regular with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, has been aware of sculptor and artist Eduardo Paolozzi's work since he moved to Edinburgh nine years ago. He - like many among the capital's population and visitors - has strolled beside the large black foot and hand that sit at the top of Leith Walk, and marvelled at Paolozzi's gifts. But it wasn't until he went along to the National Galleries' Paolozzi at 80 retrospective exhibition in 2004 that he realised just how versatile and inspiring the Leith-born artist was.

An idea began to form that he might write some music in response to Paolozzi's work. He'd been inspired by writers and visual artists before - as its name suggests, the track Hieronymus on Trianglehead's second album, Exit Strategy, reflects Kershaw's fondness for the work of Hieronymus Bosch - and apart from his versatility, there was another quality that Kershaw admired in Paolozzi: his fearlessness.

"I loved the way that he never seemed to toe the line," says Kershaw of his muse. "You never get the impression that he's thought, Oh, that went well, I'll do some more of the same. He was always moving on and open to going wherever his art took him."

Which brings us to the chamber music group and the rock band. When Kershaw heard Mr McFall's Chamber trio playing electric violin, viola and cello at the Dialogues festival in the Queen's Hall last year, he immediately wanted to write something for them. He already knew about their eclectic back catalogue - which runs from Astor Piazzolla's new tango to King Crimson's prog rock and traditional music maverick Martyn Bennett - and he perceived a Paolozzi-like fearlessness in their approach.

The MacFalls welcomed Kershaw's advances and the chance to work with their electric instruments again - Kershaw did give them the option of playing both acoustic and electric but keen to explore their effects units, they went with the latter. The instrumental line-up was expanded to 10 with the addition of colleagues from the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, Trianglehead and other jazz projects. The Scottish Arts Council weighed in with a contribution from its recently established new work fund, and Kershaw ensconced himself in his cottage near Biggar with a strict, self-imposed policy. While working on Hero as a Riddle, as the new work is called, he could listen to no music at home apart from Radiohead's latest album, In Rainbows.

"I normally listen to all sorts of music and you can't help but be inspired by things that are going on around you," he says. "But with this piece I was scared that I'd end up writing something I'd heard the day before and thinking it was my own idea. The thing that appeals to me about Radiohead is that, like Eduardo Paolozzi and the MacFalls, they go wherever they want to go. They don't write what their record company dictates or what they think their fans want to hear, although invariably their fans want to hear - and like - whatever new direction they go off in."

Kershaw doesn't hear Radiohead in Hero as a Riddle, which he has written in 10 instalments, completing one a month since January. It is, he feels, a completely new departure.

"It's not a jazz piece," he says. "It doesn't go into a swing tempo, although it might do on the gigs because there's room for improvisation, and I managed to resist the temptation to just slip in a blues or take an idea so far and then repeat it when the discipline of writing got tough."

And it did get tough. Before tackling this piece, which will run for two 45-minute sets in concert, Kershaw had never written for a bigger instrumentation than a jazz sextet, which generally consists of striving for a strong melody and producing simple harmonies for the front-line instruments plus piano chords. He'd never written for string players before and he did himself few favours, he concedes, with his composing method.

These days many, if not most, composers write on computer programmes, such as Finale or Sibelius. This makes changes and rewrites easy, but for Kershaw the sound when the results are played back is generally disappointing. So he used Reason, which is a sequencing programme and gives a good approximation of how the music will sound when played on the instruments involved, particularly stringed instruments, even electric ones. Once he had the notes as he wanted them, he then copied out a full score by longhand - inspiring pity and questions as to his sanity from colleagues - and created the individual parts from that.

"There was a lot of trial and error and it was a really long process but the thing with Reason is that it's easy to edit and, having more or less the sound that's in your head coming out of the speakers, you can tell if what you're doing is going to work," he says. "I still took parts to the string players about half way through to make sure I was on the right lines, and generally I was, which was a huge relief."

Hard work though it proved, writing to photographs of Paolozzi's creations and for a hand-picked group of players did prove as inspiring as he imagined it was going to be. The one slight concern he has is that the music may be written so specifically for the players involved that future performances will require all the original participants, busy musicians every one, to be available at the same time again. This could be tricky.

Still, the nature of the SAC funding has ensured that Hero as a Riddle, unlike many new musical works, is receiving more than one performance and is actually going to be recorded for release on CD. Kershaw has also been heartened by the response from the visual arts world. Several galleries have expressed interest in staging the new work alongside Paolozzi's pieces, and Daniel Herrmann, who curated the Paolozzi at 80 exhibition, has agreed to set the scene for the first three performances with a pre-concert talk. "I'm really excited about playing the music live," says Kershaw, "and if we can take it into some other venues that don't normally host music and reach people who don't usually get to hear this sort of thing, that will be a fantastic bonus."

Martin Kershaw's Hero as a Riddle plays Cowdray Hall, Aberdeen, tomorrow as part of a weekend of saxophone-focused events at the 2008 Sound Festival of new music.

Further information at www.sound-scotland.co.uk.
The band then appears at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, on Wednesday, November 5; and Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, on Friday, November 7.