Parthenope: 'I'm interested in simple, super-melodic playing'

“I went along and heard it and thought it was the coolest thing ever and that sparked an interest in it,” says the 20-year-old, from Leeds. A short while later, her mother, who worked for a music centre, was given some instruments to sell. “The only one that didn’t sell was the alto saxophone...I begged my mum to let me have it and she said, ‘It can be your fun one on the side’. Obviously if it’s your fun one then that’s the one you want to pursue.”

Given a CD by the US saxophonist Michael Brecker as a Christmas gift, she became intrigued, listening to it repeatedly on car journeys. “It was Pilgrimage, the album he made before he died,” she says. “It was beyond me, I didn’t understand any of it – that was why it was so magic at the time, because I wanted to know what was going on, how he was doing what he was doing. It probably inspired me a lot more than I actually realised.”

At Chethams School of Music in Manchester, she learnt about “all the big sax players”, but she became interested in “simple super-melodic playing – people like Chet Baker, who will make a beautiful, almost singable melody”. “I’ve not really centred my playing around sax players, if I’m honest,” she says. “I’ve transcribed a lot of singers and trumpet players, just because it can make your playing less like muscle memory. Sax players just play things that fall nicely on the saxophone, if you trabnscribe different instruments you can pick up all these different sounds that normally sax players just don’t go for because it’s not as easy to access them.

“As far as sax players go, I really like Patrick Bartley. At the moment I’m listening to bands and not as much jazz, but all of it has had an influence on me. Of course my music is jazz-influenced, but I feel it has more of a pop structure. There’s elements of improvisation right through it, but it’s more accessible to the regular person.”

Parthenope features on the new album Blue Note: Reimagined II, singing and playing on a cover of Don’t Know Why by Norah Jones. “I thought I could run away with the jazz influence a little bit but also it’s got that really beautiful, nostalgic, simple melody, and I kind of want my music to have that,” she says.

She is currently in her third year at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and is enjoying the capital’s jazz scene, which she has found “really supportive of female artists” and diverse.

“I love being up north, I always visit, but when I moved to London, it was hard because there was Covid through a lot of it, but I was trying to meet as many people as I could and go to as many venues as I could, and get ties in the scene, so I felt like I was a part of it," she says. ”But I didn’t want to become part of a clique. There are so many different types of music that I’m interested in, I almost want to do everything and pick and choose when the time comes to make a project.”

On December 3 she will bring her band to The Wardrobe in Leeds.