Corto.alto Tickets

Though few people outside of the UK jazz clique would’ve been familiar with multi-hyphenate, multi-instrumentalist corto.alto before his Mercury Prize nomination, his shortlisting rightly illuminated one of the genre’s most ambitious disruptors.

corto.alto is the brain-child of fast-emerging Glasgow-based composer, producer and player Liam Shortall. Surrounded by music from a young age, he learned the proverbial ropes from classic jazz musicians such as Herbie Hancock, Wynton Marsalis and Sonny Rollins. A digital native with unfettered access to a vault of music at his fingertips, autodidact Shortall adopted similar approach to cherry-picking music genres to absorb as he did learning to play instruments – trombone, guitar, bass, synths, programming, tuba and percussion came under his spell. 

So, it was almost inevitable that Shortall would carve out a path in music at some point. Though, his initial musical meanderings came at opportunistic moments whilst living above a Glasgow nightclub, given carte blanche to sketch out some compositions whilst indie music blared through the speakers and inebriated teenagers flooded onto the street. 

Thinking little about what would come from the batch of songs he accumulated, Shortall posted them periodically on Facebook under the guise corto.alto, as a joke – ‘short, tall’ in Spanish is ‘corto alto’. His dad’s Spanish… geddit?

The project snowballed with a revolving door of local friends and collaborators, as Shortall immersed himself deeper into the fervent Glasgow jazz scene. In 2019, he released his debut EP as corto.alto, Live from 435, Vol.1, named after his address in Sauchiehall Street where he lived with members of Mungo’s Hi Fi. Taking corto.alto to the live arena, he kept the sentiment the same, inviting a series of new guests to perform on stage each night, showcasing all that the city had to offer. 

Vol.2, Vol.3, Vol.4 and Vol.5 followed suit, even throughout the pandemic when live music had to grind to a halt. Shortall further experimented with sumptuous, sun-kissed soundscapes laden in breezy brass instrumentation and wavy rhythms on the 2021 EP Not for Now. A word-of-mouth sensation in his hometown, he played a massive headline set at SWG3 the next year.

But corto.alto’s debut album, Bad For Names, released in 2023 on label New Soil x Bridge The Gap would alter the course of Shortall’s trajectory irrevocably. 

Come 2024, the multi-instrumentalist would find himself Mercury Prize nominated, stunning the wider jazz community as it pipped various other prestigious names as the award’s token pick. Complete with dense, metronomic grooves and melding with flickers of dub, broken beat and punk music production, Bad For Names was a worthy pick indeed. The producer’s newfound gaze won corto.alto coveted spots at festivals like Cross The Tracks, We Out Here, Mostly Jazz Funk & Soul Festival, and a headline set at London’s state-of-the-art venue HERE at Outernet.

Capping off a stellar year for the protean musician, corto.alto play Bristol’s Thekla, Manchester’s YES, Headrow House in Leeds and London’s Village Underground.