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To release our debut album of spiritual music for saxophone and piano - What Shapes A Soul?
My name is Samuel Beddard and I am a saxophonist and arranger based in Hertfordshire, UK. Alongside my pianist Jo Foote, we are looking for funding to help produce our debut album What Shapes A Soul?.
What Shapes A Soul? takes the listener on a grand globe-trotting adventure tracing the roots of spiritual music - travelling from gospel to African folk, through the worlds of hymns, soul, spirituals, jazz, and blues.
Throughout the 2025/26 musical season, Jo and I toured twenty venues across the UK, performing music from What Shapes A Soul? to over a thousand listeners, and garnering national praise from the Clarinet and Saxophone Society of Great Britain.
We recorded the complete album in June 2026 live in front of an exclusive sellout audience at Hammerwood Park, East Sussex. Engineered and mixed by leading musical pioneer David Pinnegar, the recording session utilized his expansive vintage microphone collection recorded onto analogue tape, and featured his 1885 Bechstein Model III grand piano, tuned to an unequal temperament developed by Johann Philipp Kirnberger, a leading student of Johann Sebastian Bach himself.
What Shapes A Soul? will release on Saturday 24th October 2026, with an album release concert at St Andrew's Church, Rugby. More details can be found at samuelbeddard.co.uk.
All donations help support the final stages of bringing this project to life, including the CD production costs, mixing & engineering costs, and the venue hire for the album release concert.
The Music:
The album opens with Omar Thomas's gospel extravaganza Come Sunday, in a reduction of the original wind band score for tenor saxophone and piano, written following a saxophone orchestra arrangement I wrote in 2025, which was premiered in Ely Cathedral by the Guildhall Saxophone Orchestra.
We then move to Steven Banks' monumental Come As You Are for tenor saxophone and piano. Myself and Jo presented the UK premiere of this work back in Rugby School Chapel in 2024, with audiences praising the saxophone's "tone like that of a songbird".
The first disc of the album closes with an arrangement of the soul masterpiece A Change is Gonna Come that was written especially for the tour. All three of these works represent pivotal waypoints in modern cultural history, and begin our journey to spiritual music's roots.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's reimagining of the African-American spiritual Deep River provides the opening to the second disc on the album, in an arrangement originally for violin and piano by Maud Powell, for whom Coleridge-Taylor wrote his Violin Concerto.
Our programme then pays homage to one of the great pioneers of jazz - Sidney Bichet - and his fusion of African folk music with New Orleans blues tradition in Egyptian Fantasy, here reimagined by French saxophonist Emile Parisien in an arrangement for soprano saxophone and accordion (transcribed for piano in this instance).
Now in the cultural landscape of African tradition, Les Égarés' retelling of the Malian blues melody Dou takes the place of the penultimate work of the album, in an arrangement for soprano saxophone and piano adapted from the original quartet of saxophone, accordion, cello and kora.
The final work of the album is a large-scale work titled Suite after Abel Selaocoe. Based upon the music of the pioneering young cellist bringing African traditional music to new audiences, this original arrangement takes the form of a Bach Cello Suite, weaving together dances from African folk music rather than their original Baroque counterparts.
An encore written as an optional 6th movement to the Suite takes the place of the final track on the album. Tsohle Tsohle is an African hymn that speaks of the power of universal togetherness in a moving duo for soprano saxophone and piano.
Testimonials:
“Confident and daring playing, featuring an edge of growls, multiphonic cracks, more intentional dips and scoops that made for a really exciting and individual sound… I have only praise for Beddard and Foote for what is an original project, well arranged, researched, and performed” – Jack Marley, saxophonist and reviewer for the Clarinet and Saxophone Society of Great Britain magazine
“I don’t think anyone has heard anything quite as special as this, truly revolutionary” – David Pinnegar, owner of Hammerwood Park, East Sussex
“What a tour de force of saxophone playing” – Michael Alexander, compere at St Peter’s Church, St Alban’s
“Absolutely sensational” – Jane Smith, curator of The Sunday Sessions, Cottingham
“Absolutely amazing. Spell-binding; haunting…. I don’t think anyone moved or made a sound through the whole recital” – Phil Johnson, organist at St James the Greater, Leicester
“You’ve soothed our souls and taken us around the world at the same time… our souls have been soothed, awakened, and perhaps we’ve got much to contemplate” – Fr Andrew Hall, vicar at St Catherine’s Church, Burbage
“To say we were privileged is an understatement” – Philip Davis, churchwarden at St Mary’s, Kemp Town, Brighton
“You make the soprano laugh and cry, and your playing of it is so emotive and wonderful” – Sarah Spurr, educator-arranger
“We were on the edge of our seats throughout in the best possible way” – Michelle Fotherby – assistant curate at St Mary’s Church, Old Amersham
Track List:
Come Sunday
1. I. Testimony
2. II. Shout!
Come As You Are
3. I. Lift My Eyes
4. II. Times of the Storm
5. III. Strength of My Life
6. IV. Lift My Hands
7. A Change is Gonna Come
8. Deep River
9. Egyptian Fantasy
10. Dou
Suite after Abel Selaocoe
11. I. Qhawe
12. Bana
13. II. Kea Morata
14. Leetong
15. III. Hlokomela
16. Uthando
17. IV. Takamba
18. Invocation
19. V. Ka Bohaleng
20. Tsohle Tsohle
Credits:
Saxophones - Samuel Beddard
Piano - Jo Foote
Engineering & Mixing - David Pinnegar
Mastering - Samuel Beddard
Artwork - Angela Foote
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 24th October 2026 at 7:00pm