🎧 Approved: corto.alto

Glasgow’s corto.alto project, led by trombonist, producer and sonic experimenter Liam Shortall, has been steadily pulling jazz into new territories. The name itself, a playful nod to Shortall’s Irish-Spanish heritage, translates to ‘short.tall’ in Spanish; an apt metaphor for music that constantly stretches and contracts, straddling the acoustic and the electronic.

New single ‘VANDAL’ might be the clearest articulation yet of Shortall’s mission. It opens with punchy live brass and percussion before bleeding into textures that belong more to Berlin’s club culture than a jazz conservatoire. That push-pull is central to corto.alto: beats steeped in hip hop and funk history, warped into something that feels equally at home on a sweaty club dancefloor.

For this track, Shortall teamed up with Berlin-based keyboardist and producer Moses Yoofee, whose sampled vocals are twisted and replayed as pure instrumentation. Stripped of words, they become another melodic texture, sometimes ghostly, sometimes percussive.

“I titled the track ‘VANDAL’ as a reminder to myself that rules in music are meant to be torn apart” Shortall says. That ethos runs through every bar here: tradition is respected, but never worshipped; boundaries are set up only so they can be broken down.

🎧Watch the video for 'VANDAL' featuring Moses Yoofee