Jazz musician Heather Webb at her Parallax concert with Michael Story and Reuben Derrick. Photo: Sabin Holloway
Music runs in the family.
So does science.
Heather Webb learnt the guitar from her father, but her mother taught her how to look through a telescope.
Webb's astrophysics-inspired jazz suite "Parallax – Music from Outer Space" makes its broadcasting debut on RNZ Concert's Music Alive at 8pm tonight.
The work was Webb's project for her Masters at the Ara Institute of Canterbury which she passed with flying colours.
Parallax is a nine-piece work for eight musicians, including Webb on guitar.
Speaking to RNZ Concert host Bryan Crump ahead of the work's broadcast, Webb says it connects and weaves improvised jazz with the structure of the universe.
Sometimes the connection is quite literal. For example, in one of the movements, Webb assigned a note to each of the 57 stars in the Mataraki cluster based on their brightness. Those notes then form the basis for the music.
Matariki, a note for each one. Photo: Unsplash / Anders Drange
At other times, the approach is more philosophical, when Webb muses on the mystery as to how sub-atomic electrons, protons and neutrons, along with photons of light, can be both waves and particles.
Webb's mother is a specialist in biomedicine but she also owns a telescope, and Webb's own fascination with the cosmos grew out of nights shared staring up into space.
Webb even took a paper in astrophysics at Canterbury University, run by Dr Karen Pollard.
At one point Dr Pollard told the students, "you can not resolve the stars". By which she meant it is impossible to perfectly focus on the disc of a distant star through a telescope on earth.
Webb loved that statement, partly because as a musician, she is always "resolving" harmonies - creating cadences that take the music back to its home key, while delaying that resolution to maintain musical interest is one of the oldest tricks in the book.
Dr Pollard's statement became the inspiration for the first piece in Webb's suite: "Resolve".
Like many guitarists, Webb has other fretted strings to her metaphorical bow. She's a founding member of the Christchurch-based All Girl Big Band, she also plays with fellow Cantabrian Delaney Davidson and even the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra.
Meanwhile, she's hoping to turn that Masters recital into an album.
You can get a preview of what that album might sound like if you tune into RNZ Concert tonight.
