Jungle, funk and 14th-century Arabic astronomers: piano virtuoso Pat Thomas on his journey through jazz

‘I see myself as a traditional player who’s just open to things,” says Pat Thomas. Respectful of heritage yet unwilling to be bound by genre, race or class, Thomas is one of Britain’s most distinctive pianists, as well as an electronics wizard and visionary composer. And at the age of 64, he is finally gaining the recognition he deserves: his acclaimed quartet [Ahmed] are playing a headline gig at EFG London jazz festival this month and younger musicians like Moor Mother and Xhosa Cole are lining up to work with him.

It’s not hard to see why: Thomas is an inspiring presence, transforming jazz, reggae, jungle, funk and modern composition into music of mind-boggling invention and beauty. “To me, the most important thing is, am I making music that can touch people’s hearts?”, he says. “I try to play in as many different contexts as possible, but there’s always going to be an element of improvisation in it for me. My intention is always to try to make good music – whether they see it as ‘new’, I leave that to other people to judge.”

Thomas is a stimulating and good-humoured conversationalist, his discussions of music, faith and anti-colonial history punctuated by infectious laughter. Asked to recall his early musical experiences growing up in Oxford, Thomas describes his Antiguan parents listening to reggae and calypso, classical and country. He was drawn to the piano after seeing Liberace on television, but it was jazz great Oscar Peterson’s 1970s BBC series that left a lasting impression: “The whole thing for piano players, especially young Black piano players, was his level of excellence.” Further exploration of jazz led him to Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra.

As his parents couldn’t afford a piano, Thomas practised on a cardboard cutout. Eventually, some neighbours donated an upright on the proviso his parents collect it. “Can you imagine these two Black people in their late 30s wheeling a piano down the road? Automatically, I saw it as an obligation. But I wanted to play the piano anyway.” In time, Thomas joined Oxford Improvisers collective, who helped bring pioneers of European free improvisation like Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker to the city, and he also played in funk band M4 with his guitarist brother Evan.

“In a way, it was very good that I was in Oxford, because of that eclecticism,” he reflects. “In London at that time for a young Black player, jazz would have been the only environment I’d have seen.”

It wasn’t long before London-based musicians took note of Thomas’s livewire piano and audacious use of synthesisers and cassettes. Guitarist Derek Bailey invited him to his Company Week festival in 1991, leading to a memorable encounter with US mavericks John Zorn and Buckethead. Thomas soon became a major figure in the improvised music scene, working with Lol Coxhill, Tony Oxley and Butch Morris, and throwing curveballs like his 1997 solo debut Remembering: New Jazz Jungle, a wild mix of Amen-break drum’n’bass, mutant funk and post-Webern atonality. “Jungle shocked people,” Thomas remarks, saying it gave him the same otherworldly thrill as free improvisation, while also chiming with his interest in dub and avant garde electronics. His own productions were inspired by the radical experimentation of jungle’s early to mid-90s golden era, before the advent of the smoother sound he mischievously calls “cafe latte”.

In 1990, Thomas became a Sufi, drawn to its traditions of scholarship and social justice. “Being a former Marxist, what I liked about the Sufis is that they were revolutionaries. They were always with the people, feeding the poor, helping their neighbours.” His faith informs his music, with his recent solo piano album The Solar Model of Ibn Al-Shatir a fine example. Named after the 14th-century Arab astronomer whose stellar theories predate Copernicus by a century, the album celebrates Islamic innovators who have been sidelined by Eurocentric versions of history, via meditations made using the inside of the piano, at times evoking gorgeous birdsong.

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Thomas feels the Arabic influence on jazz has also been overlooked. He sought to address this with [Ahmed], whose epic improvisations are based on multi-instrumentalist Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s pioneering mid-century fusion of bebop, Arabic and north African music. Obsessively working over melodies, riffs, basslines and grooves, saxophonist Seymour Wright, double bassist Joel Grip and drummer Antonin Gerbal generate a thrilling tension between repetition and development, with Thomas’s thunderous clusters and angular vamps raising the music to an ecstatic pitch. At the Glasgow gig captured on this year’s Wood Blues, the atmosphere was closer to a nightclub than a jazz gig. As Thomas had his eyes closed, he had no idea people were dancing: “We never thought that what we’re doing was danceable. We’re so locked in that it seems to work.”

Having made a remarkable recovery from a stroke in 2020, Thomas is busier than ever. Current projects include Black Top with vibraphonist Orphy Robinson, Shifa with saxophonist Rachel Musson and percussionist Mark Sanders, the piano trios Bley School and Ism, and the experimental supergroup X-Ray Hex Tet. He’s also released several electronic albums, from the extreme abstraction of Kanza Al Qalb to the polymorphous beats of This is Trick Step. As far out as his music can get, Thomas emphasises that his aesthetic has always been one of beauty, although, he hoots, “it might be a very different idea of beauty from everybody else’s!”

Source: theguardian.com