When I was a boy I wanted to be a spaceman …
I like making stuff up. Words and music. Stories.
I enjoy reading between the lines and changing things, adding notes, altering rhythms, disrupting melodies, mutating harmonies and generally getting muddled up. I have learned to call this improvisation.
I am an improvising pianist by make-up. I practice Bach fugues, Beethoven sonatas and Brahms intermezzi, not with the intention of performing these great works (I don’t have the discipline to attempt this), but rather to feed a never-ending quest for vocabulary and span in my own inventions.
Mine is a melting pot brimming over with influence from Fats Waller stride, Sousa marches, Victorian parlour tunes, the Great American songbook, Gilbert and Sullivan, Methodist hymns, plantation tunes, Beatles’ songs, Keith Jarrett meanderings, and onwards.
I am not a jazz pianist; not by its contemporary definition anyway. Still, I do tell people I am a jazz pianist. Firstly I do this because I need to tell them something and secondly, because it hopefully gets up the nose of the jazz fraternity with their intellectualised, exclusive approach.
I love people and the places I find them. It amuses me to hold up the pathetically insignificant against the background of the Cosmos. I cannot help being drawn to the absurd and ridiculous. I respond to colossal upheaval with dismissive ease and react to the tiniest debacle with incandescent rage. My storytelling, my music, my verse, my shows may, or may not, reflect this.