MOBO winners Empirical experiment with every album. Out ’n’ In, which led to the Best Jazz Act award, was a tribute to the alto sax king Eric Dolphy. Elements Of Truth, which arrived two years later in 2011, took inspiration from Björk, Vijay Iyer, Olivier Messiaen, Steve Lehman and House Of Horror.

The four players wanted to reflect on the immediacy of music, how “we can listen to almost any music in the world at the touch of a button, how music is eclectic where styles and genres are bent and blurred”.

For their latest effort, Tabula Rasa, the quartet responded to winning the inaugural Golubovich Jazz Scholars fellowship at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance by inviting a group of string players from the school to contribute.

The Benyounes Quartet – violinists Zara Benyounes and Emily Holland, viola player Tetsuumi Nagata and cellist Kim Vaughan – certainly made the studio more interesting.

“It’s amazing what having four girls in the practice room does for the dynamic,” jokes bass player Tom Farmer.

It’s long been an ambition of the band – Farmer plus Nathaniel Facey (alto saxophone), Shaney Forbes (drums), Lewis Wright (vibraphone) – to fuse contemporary jazz and classical.

They’ve discussed orchestras (too big) or inviting in wind instruments (maybe later), but plumped for a string quartet after taking some lessons in the style at Trinity.

Adding other elements

Bringing in Benyounes Quartet seemed like the best way to realise the ambition.

“At first we were a bit tentative,” continues Farmer. “The classical world is very proper. They are very studied and practiced. Their strength is being able to understand any music put in front of them and communicating it beautifully. They never make anything up and we spend our lives making things up.”

But after sparring, with the girls improvising then the boys trying their hands at a Schubert piece, the group ran through a couple of new things Empirical had written.

“That established what would work: us writing for them. They are not trained to improvise. Making them do that would be like us trying to play a concerto. And teaching them the secrets of improv would be like undoing 20 years of training.”

So, rather than asking the string players to add their parts on top of existing material, or writing rearrangements, Empirical wrote new music specifically for this project. As a result, each track on Tabula Rasa explores a different concept of the string quartet tradition, which means they’ve been able to take the improvisation into new territory.

The band name comes from the quartet’s aim “to gather knowledge though research and experiment”.

The research side prompted the tribute to Dolphy, other homages to Thelonious Monk and Severino Gazelloni – and last month’s show at Pizza Express Soho, where their choice for a series of shows celebrating 50 years of Blue Note records was Herbie Hancock’s Empyrean Isles.

“It’s such a deep record with so much variety and opportunity to get involved.”

Combining the studious side with the experimental side makes Tabula Rasa (Latin for “blank slate”) an anthology of sorts. Each track being a story or character in its own right.

“Telling stories is something we have always been interested in. Part of jazz music is the context of being on a journey from A to B, developing through a period of time with characters, that’s really what bonds all the music we like together so we always try to capture a bit of that.

“And when we perform we like to take the audience on a journey. It’s not specific. People can make up their own ideas. The point is they are a different person from who they were at the start.”

Though some of the tunes on the record have specific stories. The Prophet is “about all about the character who can show you the way when you don’t know the way and can give you the best piece of advice”.

Whereas One For “Bones” Jones is all about a mixed martial arts UFC fighter who Nathanial Facey knew. “He is a fan of that and he was inspired by this character who is a world champion. “He wanted to get this idea of how to express yourself in a confined space, so it has a very specific structure, is fast-paced and you can get a sense of his character.”

  • Empirical, Brighton Dome Studio, New Road, Brighton, Friday, February 7
  • Starts 8pm, tickets £12. Call 01273 709709