Bristol-based bassist, composer and multi-instrumentalist Al Swainger leads Pointless Beauty, a project that brings together progressive jazz, fusion, electronic production and collective improvisation. Its new album, Impure Imagination, is out now.

His ten choices offer a revealing route into that musical world. From Weather Report and Miles Davis to Genesis, Iron Maiden, Future Sound of London, David Bowie and Prince, the records share an interest in strong ensemble identity, distinctive sound worlds and music that resists neat stylistic boundaries.

As Swainger explains, these are not simply favourite albums, but records that have helped shape the way he writes, arranges and performs: particularly his belief that virtuosity, technology and improvisation are most powerful when they serve the collective sound.

Weather Report – Heavy Weather

I think I first heard this when I was around 11 or 12. I remember my grandmother asking for it to be turned off as it hurt her ears…

At that age I don’t think I knew what to make of it, which I guess is true of a lot of things when you encounter them for the first time. There’s an excitement I find in the unfamiliar, and not quite knowing what’s going on or how to interpret it is part of the joy.

Listening with older ears, what remains essential about this album, to me, is how firmly it sounds like a group. The intention between them is so strong it barely feels as though anyone is taking solos in the traditional sense, and everything fits so perfectly it can almost sound as though someone wrote the whole thing out in advance and they simply performed it.

It’s so stylistically and texturally distinct too – totally its own sound world. There’s virtuosity everywhere, but it’s completely in service to the music and never feels like anyone is showing off. A Remark You Made still feels heartbreakingly melancholy and optimistic to me, Havona throws solos around with joyous brevity, and the choice of synth sounds on The Juggler really matters to how the track feels.

Importantly, it also treats the ensemble in quite a non-hierarchical way. Everyone feels equally important.

Genesis – A Trick of the Tail

I’d already been intrigued by Genesis after hearing Mama on Top of the Pops in 1983, but when I started listening to things my dad already had on his record shelf, A Trick of the Tail became my real jumping-on point. From there I worked both backwards and forwards through the catalogue.

It never bothered me that Genesis records didn’t sound the same as each other, just as I don’t care that Phil Collins doesn’t sound like Peter Gabriel. I loved the evolution of the music. It took me much longer to understand the Gabriel-era records because I found them much denser, whereas A Trick of the Tail sits, for me, at an interesting junction where all that prog complexity is still there but a more focused pop understanding is beginning to emerge.

Dance on a Volcano is such a dramatic opening – what an entrance! It was also a great way of hearing music in time signatures outside 4/4 without feeling any need to count what was happening. The music just did what it felt like it needed to do without seeming to be trying to be clever for the sake of it. If it needed to be in 7/8 it just was, and effortlessly so.

Throughout the album I find it really exciting how it unfolds and transforms as it goes, with so much textural variety, independently moving parts and incredible melodies. It also really understands emotional pacing. The track sequencing is a work of art; the folky wistfulness of Entangled is a wonderful opportunity to decompress after Dance on a Volcano, for instance. I love albums that take you from start to finish as a considered whole. Just enough time to reflect on where a track has taken you before realising you’re now somewhere quite different.

It’s still one of their albums I go back to most often.

Iron Maiden – Somewhere in Time

The first seven Iron Maiden albums were really influential for me, and there’s quite a lot of experimentation in those records: shifting moods, long-form structures and instrumental sections, and those trademark sudden changes into completely different tempos. It’s also interesting how often both guitarists take solos on the same track, which creates quite a change of energy, as they had fairly different musical personalities.

I picked Somewhere in Time because it was one of the first albums I really got into. One of the standouts is Stranger in a Strange Land, with this gorgeous counterpoint section of interweaving melodic lines between bass and guitar that gradually gets busier and heavier until the whole thing hits full stride again. Steve Harris is one of the great melodic bass players in rock, in my opinion, and a big influence.

For me, the appeal of heavy rock is that distorted guitars seem to add another hundred yards of emotional range. They provide an outlet for a particular type of aggressively strong emotion in such a primal way, but also aren’t afraid to be very calm and vulnerable.

As a player I don’t think I really understood the draw of the heavier end until someone lent me a guitar and distortion pedal and I tried it for myself. There’s a reason they’re called power chords! That sense of unleashing something on the edge of control was really appealing as a teen, and it never really left.

Marillion – Clutching at Straws

I remember hearing Lavender on the radio, as part of a live gig after the release of Misplaced Childhood, and instantly being caught by the melodic playing of Pete Trewavas.

Where Jaco’s playing on Heavy Weather is much more virtuosic, Trewavas’s felt much more relaxed to me, more about exploiting register and space than demanding attention.

They were a huge band at the time, so when I was buying records of my own Clutching at Straws naturally swelled my fairly small collection. I learned so much about arrangement and how musicians embellish ideas through a song by transcribing and building MIDI arrangements of the opening three tracks – Hotel Hobbies / Warm Wet Circles / That Time of the Night. I think I learned all the bass lines for the whole album note for note too.

I still hear these approaches, along with those of Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris and Rush’s Geddy Lee, cropping up in my electric playing now. They formed a lot of the language through which I learned to move away from just playing root-note lines.

Miles Davis – Amandla

Miles is a major inspiration for me generally because every era is different and seems to offer some fresh perspective on how music can be put together.

I first encountered Amandla in a sixth-form music lesson. I’d been playing swing in big bands for years – albeit on French horn in trombone sections – and had played some bass in a group covering all sorts of music, including standards. I was also borrowing a wide selection of music from the library, everything from Oscar Peterson, Charlie Parker and Count Basie to Pat Metheny and Chick Corea. So I wasn’t unfamiliar with what jazz could sound like, but Amandla hit me as sooooo different.

Like Heavy Weather, it has its own sound world and the choice of sounds and textures is incredibly important. I’d also not heard muted trumpet used so extensively before, but what really struck me was the way the layers are blended. It doesn’t feel like a traditional ensemble with synthesizers added to it so much as a collage of sounds.

Where a lot of the jazz I knew then followed more traditional forms of melody, solos and a return to the melody, the tracks on Amandla feel much more built from motifs, textures and rhythmic ideas for the players to bounce off, while harmony seems implied through layers rather than an obvious chord sequence underneath everything. In retrospect it’s obvious to me that there’s a clear link back through his earlier electric work, but here it feels contained within a more structured and pre-planned framework.

For me this gave the whole album a wonderful sense of mystery. It didn’t feel like soloists with a rhythm section to me but something much more organic and otherworldly.

If I could only take one track to a desert island it would be Hannibal.

Chick Corea – The Chick Corea Elektric Band

I absolutely adore Chick Corea’s output. He’s another huge influence, and my concept of how to approach Latin jazz very much comes from listening to his records.

Like many of the others I’ve chosen, you’re never in any doubt that what the music sounds and feels like is just as important as what the soloists are up to. I love the stylistic diversity too: from the first note of City Gate we’re straight into a sort of Latin progressive-rock thing, but later the same album ends up playing bebop on Got a Match?

It’s a bold choice to go fully electric with electronic drums, sequenced parts and no standard top-line horn. I love that sense of not quite knowing who is making what sound or exactly how it’s being produced, while the guitar playing is generally pretty much out-and-out rock and seems oddly down to earth in context.

What’s great is that none of the technology reduces the sense of interaction or virtuosity. It’s just another part of the ensemble and another way of creating a particular sound world.

Bill Evans – You Must Believe in Spring

This list hasn’t really contained anything from what people might consider ‘classic’ jazz. Swing is the thing I’ve generally found the most opportunity to play and explore with other people, but conventional small-group jazz can be quite hierarchical in how musical space is distributed. I don’t have a problem with that on its own terms, but in my own music I’m much more interested in equity of expression than continually reinforcing those roles.

I do, however, have a strong resonance with the textural and sonic purity of the piano trio. There’s a natural openness to it that Bill Evans particularly exemplifies for me, and especially on this record. When I compose using piano, this is the vibe I’m usually most easily drawn to.

Where so much of the music I listen to is built around strict pulse, often quite metronomic, I love that time is constantly being negotiated between the players here. There’s a wonderful organic ebb and flow to it, and a fragility and yearning in how they occupy the time and space together. That pervasive sense of melancholy and acceptance really gets to me.

We Will Meet Again probably brings all of this together most concisely. It moves from that almost classical, rubato quality into wonderfully light swing, while also being a great example of what I think of as the ‘Bill Evans One’. It’s in 3/4, but the subdivisions move so freely that it often feels more like one broad pulse, letting the time float from bar to bar rather than locking it into a fixed metre.

The whole album is wonderful, but if I had to pick one track from it to take with me, that would probably be the one.

Future Sound of London – Dead Cities

FSOL create these weird soundscapes that invite you into other sonic worlds. They’re generally pretty dystopian, but the sense of sound being ‘played with’ as a way of improvising production is really fascinating to me.

You never really know what’s going to happen next. It constantly shifts and taps into that sense of curiosity in a way that a good film does, and although there’s no sense of ensemble at all, there is a strong sense of moving through some hidden narrative that unfolds in real time.

One for headphones to just lose yourself in.

I’m drawn to this kind of approach when working with loopers and Ableton for free-improvisation performances. It’s a great illustration of how much intention can bind the strangest of elements together. Perhaps dip into My Kingdom as a gentle starting point.

David Bowie – Earthling

The drum and bass opener of Little Wonder takes no prisoners – the dynamics are extreme, as is the frequency range. You only really get the full benefit on a good system, because heard through a phone or laptop speaker quite a lot of what makes it extraordinary simply disappears.

That’s something I think about when mixing my own music too. You have to decide who you’re actually making the record for, and I tend to assume that the people most likely to engage deeply with what I do are also quite likely to be listening attentively on reasonably good equipment. There seems little point compromising that experience simply to optimise everything for phone speakers.

The music itself is another chameleon. Little Wonder, for example, starts in drum and bass territory and then shifts into pretty heavy rock, embracing a variety of influences without feeling inhibited by having to be one thing or another.

The album as a whole has a wonderful hybrid feel of a rock band in union with a DJ aesthetic. It borrows the repetition and rhythmic insistence of club music, but the functional priority feels different because the arrangement, textures and interaction are constantly pulling your attention somewhere else. The combination of Reeves Gabrels’ violent guitar and Mike Garson’s bebop piano chaos on Battle for Britain is amazing. The whole vibe of sequenced material and live players morphing in and out of each other is a real inspiration for me.

Prince – The Gold Experience

The Gold Experience is probably my favourite of Prince’s albums from beginning to end and the one I play most often, although you could pick almost any of them and find endless moments of genius. I got really obsessed in the late 90s and bought pretty much everything he did.

What always stands out is how great he is at what I think of as the ‘head bob’ factor: grooves so compulsive you can’t help but find yourself moving, however subtly, whatever style he’s in. It’s not a new thing – Stevie Wonder and James Brown are also great examples – but what fascinates me is how Prince can make that kind of repetition keep developing across so many different influences.

Simple elements are constantly introduced or evolving as tracks play through, sometimes through programming and sometimes by leaving space for the musicians to push against what’s already there. We March starts with sampled marching but immediately puts it on the offbeat before weaving it into a more syncopated shuffle loop. How cool and subversive is that? On other tracks I Hate You lets the musicians build tension around a gospel vamp, punctuated by melodramatic hits and rock-outs, while Now gets you sonically stoned with its conversational rap style, constantly pushing and pulling at the pulse underneath.

It’s a masterclass in using repetition creatively by understanding what machines do well, what humans do well, and how to keep our ears hungry by switching things up just enough at just the right times.