Music Industry News

Wellington-based composer and saxophonist Jake Baxendale and his group Gardening Music have been selected as the recipients of the 2025/26 SOUNZ Jazz Recording Project | Ngā Hopuranga Puoro Tautito a SOUNZ. This project is an annual opportunity to create high-quality audio and video recordings of original compositions by New Zealand jazz composers, and is currently in its sixth year. Gardening Music has taken many forms but Jake is typically joined by Louisa Williamson (tenor saxophone), Duncan Haynes (piano), Johnny Lawrence or Seth Boy (bass) and Abe Baillie (drums). On receiving this award, Jake says:

“I was stoked to be selected for the SOUNZ Jazz Recording Project. There have been some great projects funded since its inception and I’m honoured to be part of the growing list! I’m looking forward to getting together with my Gardening Music band and digging into the tunes in the run up to the recording. There are some older pieces in the mix which will benefit I think from our newer approaches.”

Gardening Music was born out of Jake’s love of gardening as a tonic for the travails of the working musician. Gardening seemed like music’s opposite: immediate, physical, smell-of-the-earth, dirt-under-the-fingernails, rain-or-shine work with tangible results you can put in your mouth and eat. However, he eventually came to realise that the two disciplines are closer than they appear. Since launching Gardening Music, Jake’s compositional approach has expanded to encompass ideas borrowed from writers in the environmental humanities, and has played around with form and improvisation in a way that produces unexpected results. Jake elaborates:

“The repertoire we’ll be recording is material I’ve been meaning to record, or have attempted to record before but ended up on the cutting room floor. There’s a selection of older pieces which are more song-like, and one or two of my newer compositions which take a more “collage” approach. The band can choose between lots of different parts and the theme emerges only slowly and partially throughout the performance, mixing initial statements with concluding statements, and blurring the notion of beginning and ending. It’ll be interesting to see how we can gel these different ideas together into a cohesive performance. I also proposed we record outside, in nature, which would be awesome – though we’ll see how that pans out!”

Jake’s proposal was selected from a competitive field of sixteen composers, working across a variety of jazz genres in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. The selection panel this year was made up of Nick Tipping, Cameron Pearce, and professor of jazz studies at Eastman School of Music and international representative, Christine Jensen. New to Aotearoa’s jazz scene, Christine Jensen commented on the strength of Jake’s application, and on that of the whole field:

“I was so inspired being a part of this process, and getting a glimpse into the creative New Zealand jazz scene. All of the entries were full of forward-thinking sounds capturing the evolution of this music. Congratulations to Jake who stood out from the strong finalists. I look forward to hearing the recording of Jake’s project come to life in 2026.”

Jake and Gardening Music will record a series of tunes in the early part of 2026, with the resulting audio recordings and films released jointly on the SOUNZ website, as well as on Jake’s platforms. Listen to previous work from Gardening Music on Jake’s Bandcamp page here, or check out SOUNZ Films’ coverage of Jake’s 2023 Wellington Jazz Festival commission, Waypeople.

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