corto.alto on friendship and collaboration

There’s a bit of a mantra around careers in the arts that you shouldn’t go into them unless you can’t imagine doing anything else; you wouldn’t encourage your child to walk that long and uncertain path unless they were obsessed to the occlusion of all other options. Speaking to corto.alto’s Liam Shortall in the artist's studios above The Skinny's office, you come to realise that he is the living embodiment of this lifestyle, this devotion to the craft. He wants to make music from the minute he wakes up until it’s bedtime, and sometimes for several hours after that (luckily he has some patient flatmates).

He loves making music even if no-one else wants to listen, and he loves making music even if it’s terrible. He actually seems to love it especially then – he says he’s learning to enjoy that, to understand that it’s part of the process.

In Shortall’s own words, he can be “a bit of a control freak”, and he has learned to fight those instincts in the recording process. He knows, for example, that if he presents band member, SAY Award winner and fellow Mercury Prize nominee Fergus McCreadie with a specifically scored piano part, it will never be as good as if he gives McCreadie an overview and lets him interpret it through his own lens. Afterall, what’s the point of hiring your insanely talented musical friends if they can’t bring a bit of themselves onto the track.

corto.alto's latest album, SOME SMALL FORTUNE, is almost an antidote to this – at first glance it’s an album about memory and nostalgia but there’s another, unspoken, theme on the record, which is collaboration. Seven of its 15 tracks feature other artists from around the world, and that’s not even taking into account all the friends from the Glasgow jazz scene who contribute to the corto.alto sound. 

The process has been a learning curve, but also massively enriching, giving him new ways of working and a lot of new friends. GO, featuring Nigerian-based rapper Vector ,was recorded entirely remotely – and yet Shortall says it was the easiest thing he’d ever done. He wanted any excuse to get out there, to hang out, to make more music, and so eventually he flew to Lagos to record a music video and do just that. He says so much of the momentum he felt came from how keen and responsive Vector was.

“I do feel like it's a 50-50," Shortall says. "You're asking someone to contribute something, which is inevitably going to be more my thing than theirs, and [...] some people are up for committing more time or less time," he explains. "But when you work with someone remotely, like Vector, where it's like any idea, any request from me was taken with, ‘that's great, let's at least try it’... then it doesn't really make a difference if you're in the room or not.”

Perhaps the most surprising collaboration is one of those closest to home – closing track NOBLEHILL, written with Jacob Alon. Until you’ve listened to it, it’s hard to imagine how Alon’s delicate acoustics could ever make sense against corto.alto’s often maximalist, polyrhythmic, future jazz sound. But the final result is astonishing, Alon’s vocals spread out atop Graham Costello’s drumming like fine lace, the distance between the two textures creating the tension needed to resolve the album emotionally.

corto.alto. Photo: James Pearson Howes.

As in other places in the album, the trick here was to fight those maximalist tendencies: “[On] this album I’ve had to be very reductive – normally I'd be thinking how do I cram every little bit of cool melody in," he says. "This time I’ve been thinking, ‘what doesn’t need to be there, what can I take away?’” 

The journey to NOBLEHILL was years in the making. Shortall first saw Alon play at South by Southwest (“it was like we were in Texas watching David Bowie, or young Jeff Buckley”), and knew immediately he wanted them to work on music together. He’s spent the three years since then working out just what that would sound like.

Even from the point the collaboration was confirmed, the song took months to get right. The process from start to finish would look like “a big ball of spaghetti”. There were countless times when it seemed like the track would have to be held back from the album, or even be left unfinished. There were re-done string parts and a cut piano solo; sometimes it felt that they just weren’t getting there with the lyrics and friend and frequent collaborator Terra Kin had to step in to help facilitate the writing sessions.

The story of this song is one of chaos and spontaneity you could only achieve with people you really trust – there were mad-dash last-minute writing sessions from half past midnight til four in the morning that only ended because Shortall had to travel to Edinburgh Airport to begin a tour of the US, and times when Alon had to leave sessions to travel home to Dunfermline to pick up contact lenses for a gig. The vocals were eventually laid down in Shortall’s Govanhill flat, only to have to be re-recorded at Solas Sound on Berkeley Street because you could make out the sound of people fighting on the street outside.

“Jacob is so intentional with the way they write and the way they approach music, nothing can be throwaway. Everything has to really have meaning and relate to everything else that's going on in the track, and that was such an amazing thing to watch happen to a piece of music that's a bit of mine as well.”

In contrast to NOBLEHILL, SOMETHING (feat. BINA.), which immediately precedes it on the record, took just three hours to make – write the melody, record the drums, the backing vocals, the lot. Shortall is delighted and astonished in equal measure at seeing so many contrasting creative processes up close.

Every collaborator effectively got the same starting point – a folder of 30-second demos and a briefing PDF explaining his thoughts on the album. It served as a prompt, not a million miles away from the sort of thing you might find in the pages of The Artist’s Way, and just as in any writing circle, each collaborator responded to it in their own way. Some tracks started from the same demos, but we’ll never be able to tell. And isn’t that the beauty of the creative process.

“I think it's amazing how creatively different we are and how you can learn from each other. I think it's good to do both things – be really intentional, like make a song where you spend six months writing it, or you analyse every chord, every note, every rhythm, every sound that you use, and then the next day try and write something in half an hour and see how different they feel." Shortall continues: "I just feel so grateful that I've had that opportunity to work with all these people on this record and learn so much about creativity in general – it's really helped inform everything I do.”

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SOME SMALL FORTUNE is released on 4 Sep via Ninja Tune; corto.alto plays in-stores at Assai Records, Edinburgh, 3 Sep and at Some Great Reward, Glasgow, 4 Sep; catch corto.alto at Barrowlands, Glasgow, 29 Jan 2027