About
Chris is a guitar, bass, and sometimes other instrument-playing musician, originally (and still) from the outskirts of Cambridge. He gigs regularly, locally as well as in London and elsewhere in the country, and has played at, among others, Ronnie Scott's, The Vortex Jazz Club, all three PizzaExpress Live venues (on three different instruments), and Cambridge and Edinburgh jazz festivals.
Most of Chris' musical output is either jazz or jazz-adjacent, but an upbringing of blues and progressive rock, combined with gospel influences and a (slightly guilty) appreciation of country music, means that he has developed a unique voice within the jazz idiom. He also plays regularly with a few pop function bands, and has even occasionally dabbled in musical theatre.
Chris now plays mostly guitar, electric bass, and double bass. However, his musical training took him on an unconvential and circuitous route. After playing (slightly unexceptional) classical piano as a child, he was fired by double-digit numbers of piano teachers for refusing to play the written music, until finally discovering a jazz teacher at 16. Suddenly everything made sense - but he'd also picked up guitar in the meantime, and was playing in rock and pop bands too. At university, someone spotted that he owned a bass guitar, which was enough of a qualification to get booked on it. This escalated into a second job's worth of wedding and party gigs on bass and guitar, with the jazz on the side, until in 2022 Chris was awarded a scholarship for a Master's degree at the Royal Academy of Music in London on bass.
This inspired an unexpected enjoyment of composition, as well as playing, and as a result Chris has three collaborative original music projects that he (and other band members) write for: The Evans/Diamand Trio on electric bass, fusion band Zero Gravity Trio on guitar, as well a brand new Big Band writing collaboration with Italian pianist Lorenzo Bellini.
He also regularly performs with guitarist Ted Morcaldi on the double bass, as well as playing guitar on soul singer Gina Sedman’s recent UK tour.
Chris finds writing about himself in the third person slightly disconcerting, but realises, begrudgingly, that musicians are supposed to have impressive-sounding biographies these days, and no-one else is going to do it for him.
