Ever wondered what a jazz version of geese sounds like? Now's your chance

IT is a rare and mesmerising sound usually heard only by those who make the trip to one of the more remote corners of Scotland.

•Stu Brown, left, and John Hollenbeck record birdsong

But two composers have spent days in a cramped hide in the Hebrides recording the sound of wild geese to bring it to a wider audience through the medium of jazz.

The music, inspired by the sound of tens of thousands of wild geese preparing to migrate from Islay to their arctic breeding grounds, will be given its world premiere at the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival next month.

Jazz composers and musicians Stu Brown from Glasgow and New York-based John Hollenbeck travelled to Islay in the Southern Hebrides to listen to the geese and other birds before creating a jazz suite aimed at attracting a wider audience to jazz.

Islay, known as the "Queen of the Hebrides", is famous among bird watchers for its Greenland barnacle geese, attracting up to 50,000 each winter - about 70 per cent of the world's population of the birds. A further 10,000 Greenland White-fronted geese also winter there.

The commission came about after jazz festival organisers contacted the musicians - who had never met before and had no experience of bird watching - asking them to produce a piece of music based on the outdoors, funded by the Scottish Government's Scottish Jazz Expo which promotes new jazz in Scotland.

Describing their week on the island in March this year, Mr Brown, 34, said: "Just walking around the island didn't prepare us for the tremendously evocative noise of the geese we heard when we were sitting in the RSPB reserve at Loch Gruinart in the north of Islay.

"When we were in the hide and the sky was becoming darker there was a background babble of geese, but then suddenly more and more began descending.

"One goose on its own doesn't make a song but the combined sound of thousands of them makes this polyrythmic sound of several different things happening at the one time with related tempos starting simultaneously. This would then quieten down into a background sound and we started to hear the sounds of other birds such as lapwings. The lapwings had an almost electronic sound - a mixture of a radio set being tuned in and an 80s video game being played.

"People told us you become so used to the constant sound of the geese then you wake up one morning and realise there is a silence across the island.They said the silence is almost more overwhelming than the sound."

Other birds spotted which may feature in the jazz suite are rooks, choughs, oyster catchers and the island's only egret.

The musicians also decided the sounds of the birds could not be taken in isolation from the life of the island and incorporated the sounds from the Bruichladdich whisky distillery.

Children at Port Charlotte primary also suggested including the noise made by a wave generator machine and the "singing sands" of a beach.

Andy Schofield, RSPB site manager at the Oa reserve in the south of the island, said: "I'm incredibly intrigued how the musicians will translate sounds I hear almost every day into music.

"The geese really are special. When they come back and start shouting at one another it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It's just something completely wild from a wild animal."

Fiona Alexander, the festival's producer, said: "We hope this project will have a lasting influence on audiences."