Born in 1950 and moved from Cornwall to London in 1972 and started playing as a freelance jazz pianist and became involved in improvisation at the Little Theatre Club.
Fellowship with the Digswell Arts Trust in Hertfordshire in 1975 and revised a book on piano improvisation through a subsidy from the Arts Council of Great Britain. During this time co-founded and composed for Stinky Winkles. With the group was voted ‘Young Musician of 1979’ by the Greater London Arts Association and won three first prizes in France, Spain and Poland.
At Digswell collaborated with visual artists and during this period composed/performed music for films and documentaries, most notably with Lol Coxhill for Derek Jarman’s film Caravaggio (1985). Later did a degree course in Performance Art at Middlesex Polytechnic and got a 1st class Honors, and in 1990 a Masters in Music Composition from Goldsmith’s College, University of London. Had a period as a part-time ‘Interrarts’ coordinator at Bretton Hall and five years as a teacher of music composition and improvisation at Middlesex University.
In the 1980s and early 90s worked primarily with Eddie Pr é vost Quartet, Trevor Watts’ Moir é Music and duets with Lol Coxhill and Phil Minton. Worked in other ensemble projects with Phil including his quartet with John Butcher and Roger Turner, and worked in 4Walls.
Local activities in the mid 90’s was playing in a rhythm section for “Changes†jazz club in North London for a mix of guest musicians. A series of workshops/concerts titled “Playing Together†was given A4E National Lottery support. These took place in the East Anglia region (1998) involving participants of all ages & abilities; the trio featured Mark Sanders and John Edwards.
1999 was a year of commitment to organising, playing and arranging the Lindsay Cooper Song Project. European festivals have included Taktlos, Angelica (who commissioned an arrangement of “Oh Moscow†for a local orchestra), Moers and Roccella Jonica.
A collaboration with violinist Jon Rose in Europe have included a double CD release of selected recordings (Temperament) of different historical acoustic keyboards taken from concerts in Europe all of which also use different tunings.
The piece ‘Tessellations’ for solo acoustic piano awarded support from the Peter Whittingham Foundation (London - 2001), was premiered in Zurich and Geneva - October 2002, as well as being performed at the TonArt Festival (Bern, Switzerland) in January 2003 and broadcast on Swiss Radio. May 2002, an illustrated talk was given to music students at the Mathematics Faculty at Bordeaux University on the relationships between certain pentatonic scales, as heard in Tessellations, and the piece was played the next day. In March 2003, an adapted version of Tessellations was performed on the only remaining original Luth è al Piano in the world at a concert held at the Museum of Musical Instruments (Brussels). A published paper entitled New Pentatonic Scale Relationships with Visual Parallels preceded a performance of the piece (Supported by The Performing Rights Foundation) in concert at the Joint Meeting of the International Society of the Arts, Mathematics, and Architecture and the International Conference of Bridges: Mathematical Connections in Art, Music, and Science, Granada, Spain.
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