Haagse muziekdriedaagse - jong talent, grote meesters

Interview with Gwilym Simcock

“I try mainly to make optimistic music,” says the British jazz pianist and composer Gwilym Simcock.
“There is absolutely a lot of seriously heavy music that is beautiful but I want to make something lighter that still has depth. Not a facile sell-out, but not unnecessarily complicated. I love melody and I think that harmonies are still a medium that shouldn’t be underestimated in creating atmosphere. Chords for me are a way of manipulating listeners psychologically and emotionally without them being aware of it. I have a classical training as a pianist but from my seventeenth year onwards I always played jazz as well. Improvising together is tremendously exciting, also for the audience. It’s marvellous to make a story - or to hear it if I’m listening to someone else’s tale - that at a certain moment, without anything being fixed beforehand, is told in that one way, and which then evaporates”.
In the concert I wrote for myself and the orchestra of the Royal Conservatoire for the Three-Day Music Festival my own part is not set. The same applied to Mozart in 1770, though I wouldn’t want to compare myself to him of course.”

Whether working as a jazz pianist or as a composer Simcock has to cope with the unpredictable factor of the audience. He, too, is sure there’s nothing wrong with the product.
“Chick Corea makes music that has something for everyone, just as Ravel and a contemporary composer like Turnage make music that is absolutely not aloof or detached. The trouble is that this music has become distant for many people because they don’t know that it exists. People are not being educated enough when it comes to music and the industry that pop music has become doesn’t help either. Pop music in fact is often not about music at all but about image, about how short the skirts are of all the R&B girls or how they’ve been styled. It’s all about money and advertising rather than music. If you approach Ravel from that angle, all you get is incomprehension, but it’s not the music’s fault ”.