snapshot of score of String Quartet no.1

String Quartet no.1

Good morning! Welcome to my web site, where you can find out about my music, and listen to some of it, as well as my various other ventures over the years.

1 March 2023

Perfect Stranger has now played its sixth gig, a hastily arranged addition to the monthly Jazz In The Round series at The Cockpit in Marylebone, London. I just happened to look at the Cockpit’s site and noticed that the February JITR was flagged as ‘Acts TBA’, so I got in touch and landed the gig! Even better, the show was opened for us by a wonderful short solo sax set from the great Chris Biscoe, one of the original members of Perfect Stranger. We played to an audience over twice the size of any previous ones, and they were most appreciative. Before that, at Trevor Taylor’s kind invitation, we returned to Southend on 11 February, to play our fifth gig at the Jazz Centre UK. This followed on from Karamel in March 2022, Colchester Arts Centre in July, Southend’s Jazz 825 series in October and our EFG London Jazz Festival debut in November back at Karamel, who must have thought we were OK the first time.

More info on the Perfect Stranger page, where there are now two (count ’em!) photos of the whole band! (They’re both clunky, but it’s still only a stopgap until we get a proper site for the band together, with some decent photos. Coming to a screen near you soon!)

There are Perfect Stranger videos up and published on YouTube and Facebook. The first lot are four short films: one is a ‘taster’ with just extracts of the band playing, and the other three make up a mini-documentary including some of me talking about the project. Since then we’ve added some from that EFG London Jazz Festival gig. Full details and links here.

The band now consists of these excellent people: Adam Bishop and Mick Foster (saxes, clarinets, flutes), Shanti Jayasinha (trumpet and flugelhorn), Tom Green (trombone), Alcyona Mick (keyboards), Rob Millett (vibes and percussion), Eddy White (guitar), Paul Michael (bass guitar), Jonas Golland (drums) — along with various deps who have done sterling work for us at gigs — with me conducting (mostly, with the odd bit of fretless bass) — and they’re fantastic! There’s still the challenge of finding times when suitable combinations of these good people are available to rehearse, but I’m less concerned about that as we’re actively seeking further gigs and try to rehearse as close as possible to each one. Once we’re really comfortable with the music — a few gigs in, I anticipate — we should be ready to make an album titled Unfinished Business, because that’s exactly what it is. Watch this space!

PsychoYogi News

(For newcomers to this site, along with the activities described here, I also play fretless bass guitar in PsychoYogi — see my Biography.)

We played two gigs in June: Intox Extravaganza’s summer all-dayer at AMP Studios in New Cross, and at the Birds Nest. We’ve since been back to Biddle Bros., and the next gig on the slate is at the Brunswick in Hove.

The ‘live’ videos of four of our songs have been well received and appreciated. These were not in front of an audience, hence my scare-quotes, but we did play and record in real time — it was all done in our sometime drummer Jonas Golland’s bedroom! It was good fun, if a little tricky to negotiate the stands for three mics, three cameras and three lights in a very confined space — but we managed. They’re all on YouTube: Therapy Session, The Magic Tellingbone, Happy Family and Evening Call.

We seem to be pretty much settled on the splendid Arnold Lane as our drummer these days — it’s good to have this stability, and he’s a great player.

The album Shrine is still available to download and/or listen to on Bandcamp, iTunes, Spotify and Amazon (among others?).

Older News

Apart from all that, naturally, this web site: explore my works, find out about Perfect Stranger, read my biography, keep track of your harp pedal settings, and see what’s on the various other pages. You can also get in touch with me via the Contact form. And for those with a taste for historical technical curiosities, there’s even a page about my NotaFile document — and the document itself.

As well as listening to my MIDI recordings on this site, you can visit my channels on YouTube and SoundCloud to hear the same MIDI realizations of a number of my works, and see the same YouTube videos as you can see here, to get a glimpse of the scores (in most cases). These pieces are available:

Also on the Listen page is my standard disclaimer about MIDI recordings, and a note about browser compatibility with the players for YouTube, SoundCloud and plain MP3s embedded in these pages.

 
And in case anyone’s wondering, what I’m actually looking at in that photo is not the score of String Quartet no.1, but a large owl perched on my wrist.