Blue Notes: Chris Potter's 'Odyssey' album

Homer's Odyssey might not appear to have much to do with jazz or the blues, but it has inspired compositions in those areas.

Irish guitarist Louis Stewart, channelling Homer via James Joyce, composed a six-part extended work called Joycenotes which interweaves jazz with passages from the Irish author's Odyssey-inspired 1922 novel, Ulysses.

Steely Dan's Donald Fagen describes Home at Last - from their jazziest album, 1977's Aja - as "a little blues about Ulysses", and Eric Clapton collaborated with Australian poet and artist Martin Sharp on the psychedelic blues song Tales of Brave Ulysses from Cream's classic 1967 album, Disraeli Gears.

Now saxophonist and composer Chris Potter has had a crack at the theme: The Sirens, his latest album and his first as a leader for the ECM label, is based on The Odyssey, and each of the nine tracks takes its title from a character or episode in Homer's epic poem.

"This is an unusual record for me - I came up with all the music in about two weeks, writing with a theme in mind," Potter says.

"I had re-read The Odyssey after many years, and was inspired to write music with that epic, mythic mood in mind. The Odyssey is all about the big themes set in bold relief - romantic adventure and a return to home, temptation and identity, life and death.

"The stories are ancient, but human emotions never change. That's why the book still feels real to us. So I aimed for the music to have a lyricism that stemmed from that timeless human mood - and there's nothing more human than melody."