Artist description Me, all on my own doing stuff.

Music Style electronic / world fusion

Musical Influences Jazz, World, Folk, Electronic, Mediaeval

Similar Artists Mike Oldfield, Tangerine Dream, Philip Glass, Jan Garbarek, Ravi Shankar

Artist History I was born at a very early age in 1970, & started learning the trumpet & the recorder at the age of 7 (thanks to a far sighted local education authority) & played in various youth orchestras, wind bands, & brass bands. At 10 I moved to a house in a different authority, & had to have a private trumpet teacher. Shortly after I started doing occasional Jazz workshops with Digby Fairweather & Stan Barker, which I found incredibly useful. In 1981 I got interested in computers, regularly going into Tandy to play with the TRS - 80s & then after saving up my £1 a week spending money for months getting my very own ZX81 (Timex Sinclair 1000). From this point music & computers took up most of my time, but I had no particular plans to go into either directly as a career, so consequently didn't do quite as much practise as perhaps I should, & shyed away from commiting myself to learning Z80 assembly language ! By 15 - 16 I'd kind of decided I wanted to be a sound engineer, so I chose my A Level subjects of Maths, Physics, & Music as the prerequisites for doing the 'Tonmeister Studies' Music degree at the University of Surrey. Unfortunately, having glandular fever during the first year of A Levels turned me into a bit of a drop out, & finding out that the grades BCC in the Surrey prospectus realistically meant AAA kind of made me think about a different track; getting training by the BBC (they still did quite a bit of it back then) seemed the best option to try. Anyway, in the meanwhile, the 6th Form College (16 - 18 A Level school) I was at had just bought a 4 track & a synth, & a documentary (The South Bank Show) about Philip Glass had recently been shown on TV, as well as the film 'Koyaanisqatsi', & that captured my imagination enough to start some early experiments in composition at the age of 17. I got the BBC application form, but never posted it, kind of deciding that I might as well try for music college first, auditioning as first study trumpet & second study composition (the recorder in the meanwhile being dropped - an action which I have spent the last several years severely regretting - unfortunately the system here implies that it is an instrument only played by beginners, & at the time I didn't know any better). Birmingham Conservatoire accepted me as joint first study, so I went there, & started doing second study percussion as well on the Graduate Performing (GBSM, now BMus) course. this spaceintentionallyleft blank I spent most of the first year locked in the recording studio, learning just about every thing the teacher could teach me about music technology. I also developed an interest in what gets called 'World Music' (personally I despise the term, but have yet to think of any thing better), & this led me to have John Mayer, an Indian composer who did a lot of work in the 60s with the sax player Joe Harriot in 'Indo Jazz Fusions', as a composition teacher. So far I've had one commission - a piece for school orchestra, choir, recorder group, guitar group, handbell group, & narrator, 'The Legend Of Saint Kenelm' which is based on a legend local to the Birmingham area. I have also set up a company to publish my own & friends' music, 'Mahayana Music', but unfortunately busyness prevents me from pushing that to the extent it needs at the minute - I may have some extra time soon to revitalise that area, though my thoughts at the present time in that respect lead me to believe that the best way to distribute my music is to do so under the 'shareware' concept, via here - I'm in a bit of a strop with the music industry, & have decided to subvert it ! In 1997, in the week of the start of the new academic year I was given a 'career opportunity' by the Conservatoire (for whom I had worked considerably more hours than I had been paid for the previous 5 years...) - I was unexpectedly given the opportunity to find a new career ! Needless to say, I was vaguely annoyed about this, but it significantly opened my eyes as to the true nature of the music industry - at every level of every sector (be it education, performance, recording, whatever), there is only a certain level one can reach via your abilities alone - sooner or later the only way one can progress any further is to trample all over other people around you (including friends), & lick the bottoms of the other people 'above' you; both of these I have always been totally unwilling to do, & do manage to hold a certain amount of pride in the fact that I managed to get as far as I did without so doing. So now that I have a new career as a multimedia developer, I consider myself free to get back to thinking about & doing music properly again, without having to worry about whether people will like it, how much they will pay for it, whether I'm impressing the 'right people', & all that kind of stuff - I can just produce what I am led to produce. & that's the way I think it should be. There's probably a lot more I could say, but I think that's enough for now...

Instruments trumpet, synthesisers, santur, arabic percussion

Location Birmingham, n/a - United Kingdom

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