Interview in Jazz Journal

Had a great time in Germany with the Jorge Rossy/Tilman Oberbeck Quintet the other week. We played at the Jazz Federation, Hamburg, then a few gigs around Karlsruhe. Photo credit: Hans-Ulrich Frank.

Looking forward to some gigs coming up in this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival: Friday 16th and Saturday 17th November: launching Introducing REBOP at Toulouse Lautrec, Kennington. REBOP is an international quintet featuring the great Jorge Rossy on vibraphone. We recorded our first CD near Barcelona earlier this year. It is released this month on…

One of the songs I picked for my recent duo recording with Michael Kanan was Way Down Yonder in New Orleans. Written in 1922 by Turner Layton and Henry Creamer, the African-American songwriting team also responsible for the more well-known After You’ve Gone, Way Down Yonder seems to only really be played by more trad/Dixieland…

I recently read two great books about jazz that paint vivid pictures of important and fascinating times and places in the history of the music. A.B. Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop Business is divided into four sections, each one portraying a key figure in the 1960s jazz avant garde: Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Herbie…

Michael Kanan is coming over from New York this January for another tour! Can’t wait to play with him again. We’re playing together in Europe for the first time too – as well as the UK we have gigs in Switzerland and Holland. We’ll be doing a mixture of duo, trio and quartet performances so…

Born in 1928, Hampton Hawes was a pianist from Los Angeles who played with Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Wardell Gray and Art Pepper. I just finished reading his autobiography, Raise Up Off Me, written with Don Asher, himself a jazz pianist as well as an author. I’d rate it as perhaps my favourite book about…