Glorious Assembly is a 21-piece jazz orchestra featuring many of the most exciting jazz musicians performing in Britain today.

David has long harboured the feeling to create a large jazz ensemble to play his compositions. Glorious Assembly was brought together for the first time in 2025 at London’s British Grove Studios. David wanted to score his work for an extended big band to enable him to use the widest possible palette of sound textures in the music. In addition to the more usual trumpets, saxophones, trombones and rhythm section he adds woodwind from the high flute, piccolo and Eb clarinet to the low bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet and a tuba at the bottom of the brass section. In the rhythm section the guitarist doubles on electric guitar, spanish guitar and ukulele. In one piece the brass swap their instruments for echo harmonicas.

Glorious Assembly was also conceived as a way to showcase the brilliance of this celebrated array of jazz musicians. The ensemble is propelled by the drumming of Ian Thomas. Ian is joined in the rhythm section by Gareth Williams (piano), John Parricelli (guitars) and Loz Garratt (bass). In the sax section are Phil Meadows, Kasper Rietkerk, Tori Freestone, Mark Lockheart and Claire McInerney. Louis Dowdeswell leads the trumpets and Andy Wood the trombones. The band also features the outstanding jazz flautist Gareth Lockrane.

The music draws inspiration from many sources. For instance the piece “335” is an ode to the Gibson 335 hollow-body guitar which John Parricelli plays the main riff on. “Tom Wallager” comes from John Steinbeck’s novel Sweet Thursday where the characters have a Tom Wallager of a party - who or what Tom Wallager is Steinbeck never explains… There are descriptive pieces like “Tidal Flow” and “Winter Settling in my Heart”. And grittier pieces like “A Kairos (in Blue)” which ia a kind of jazz call-to-arms. But over-arching this is David’s thematic approach to composition. He believes that humans are built to relate to tunes and in music, real emotion is best telegraphed to an audience by use of thematic material. He has used this technique for many years in his film scoring and, through this suite of pieces for Glorious Assembly, now brings it to his jazz composition.

Album promo: click here. Tickets for launch concert at Messum west, Tisbury 7.00pm 2nd May 2026: click here