If you’ve seen me in person any time within the last year or so, I’ll have likely talked your ear off about my “solo set” that I’ve been working on. A number of factors pushed me in this direction but the pandemic was definitely a major one. Unable to play music with others with any real regularity, I started to work on creating music alone, with a view to performing it live. I’ve played saxophone for almost 25 years, and for most of that time I’ve played music written by other people, be it jazz standards or popular music covers.

I went to music college at eighteen to study jazz saxophone, and there seemed to be a very clear path laid out: practice a lot with the aim of playing a mix of jazz standards and originals with your own group. This wouldn’t pay the rent, but that was what teaching / private parties / weddings were for.

And this was the path I followed. I played other people’s music but always sought out musical environments where I could improvise. Improvisation is really what it’s all about for me. There is nothing more exciting for me in music than the freedom of expression that improvisation offers (maybe I’ll do more of a deep dive on what this entails in a later post if people are interested). Despite the desire to improvise, there is not always the opportunity, particularly in gigs that pay the bills. In pop songs for example (which is how I largely made a living as part of the now legendary London Essentials),there was ample opportunity for me to play saxophone solos in the middle of songs, but they were nearly always quick, straight to the point affairs, performed after leaping on to a table or sat in some unsuspecting partygoer’s lap. It was the razzle dazzle, the fireworks, and while often exhilarating, it provided no deep satisfaction (to me at least), and eventually I burned out.

I always craved something more and when I left the band, and moved to the US in 2014 (to be with my now wife and mother of our two kids), I was in a new country with very few contacts and for the first time in over a decade, not affiliated with any musical outfit. It was both terrifying and freeing, and due to my immigration status I was legally unable to pursue work. I decided this was a great opportunity to take time to regroup - and the more time that passed, the more my love of music returned.

When I was able to work again, I decided to reinvent myself and picked up gigs as a mentalist / magician performing at parties in NYC, working on my music in private (occasionally gigging when my UK friends would tour the US). Over the next few years I got work on several high-profile projects that I feel proud to be a part of, but I still hadn’t figured out the music thing on my own terms.

A turning point came from a conversation with the inimitable Tommy Antonio (pictured above on double bass) who I knew from college and performed with hundreds of times as part of the London Essentials and other bands. We were having a drink late one night in London’s Soho. I was back in town working on Derren Brown’s Underground show at the Playhouse. Several cocktails in, we were chatting about our experience at music college, the preordained path were expected to follow. I said how I felt bad for wanting to deviate from that path - as if my time at college would be for nothing if I did. Tommy told me that he had decided that he didn’t feel the need to follow that path. He was never going to be a “jazz musician” in the traditional sense. That’s not to say that the influence of jazz is absent from his music, but he was going in a different direction creatively. We discussed the idea of creative honesty, and truth - sitting at the piano and just playing. No preconceived ideas - just seeing what ideas came out. Despite this being the aim with improvisation, I had always found it difficult to not judge my ideas as I was playing them. For some reason, this discussion, on this particular evening, came at just the right time and had a profound effect on me. On returning to the US, I started creating more honestly, without worrying about what people may think about me or my music.

Things were going great until early 2020. We had a daughter and managed to avoid Covid (until just a few weeks ago), but in the beginning, the gradually increasing fire hose of tragedy and divisiveness provided by my social media addiction, really broke my brain. When I saw how awful the world was, I asked myself why anything I was doing actually mattered. Who wanted to see magic tricks or listen to my music when people were being gunned down in the streets, and those murders were being defended by what seemed like half the country? I shouted into the void for a while before things got dark for me. Luckily I had just started to shoot wildlife photography and began spending a lot of time in nature, which began to counteract the negativity I was feeling.

But I also began to get addicted to posting the photos I was making on social media, as a way searching for the approval of others. This created an internal struggle with my decision to create honestly and not care what people thought of my work. I realised I had more work to do.

It wasn’t until 2022 that I finally felt ready to quit social media, and I’ve never felt better. My IG still exists, as it still drives traffic to my website, but I am no longer posting, nor do I follow anybody. Now I’m not spending all those hours doomscrolling, I can actually spend time working on things that bring me real joy. I’m fortunate to spend almost every day in my studio and my next goal is to regularly share what I’m up to with those who show an interest. Hence these posts, and my newsletter.

The pandemic was a reset button for me in so many ways. I saw how quickly everything could be taken away, and I decided that in my creative work, I wasn’t going to compromise for another second. Another Tommy Antonio pearl of wisdom “just fucking do it.”

For me, this means I now unashamedly play synthesisers.