Allaboutjazz has just published a fascinating in-depth interview by Ian Patterson with Gwilym Simcock (Photo credit:Garry Corbett) under the title “It’s all just music”.

A few snippets:

-Gwilym currently has his head down composing a commission to be performed in the Netherlands. “I’ll just be sitting in my house getting up at eight o’clock every day in the morning and working through ’til midnight just writing music, because it’s such a long process writing orchestral music.”

-He’s been enjoying playing to audiences on the continent: “in mainland Europe you feel as if you can play exactly what you want to and people will accept that and sit back and appreciate that.”

-On touring an album: “The music develops so much more when you tour it and once you’ve done twenty or thirty concerts it takes on a completely different life from when you started.”

-On influences: “On the jazz side I’m a big fan of Keith Jarrett. I’m also a big fan of Chick Corea and John Taylor. On the classical side I’m into more contemporary music which has rather more interesting harmonic palette. I never really got into Beethoven or Mozart […]Once you get into the latter half of the twentieth century, where you have Bartok, and a wonderful French composer called Henri Dutilleux, here you’re getting into multi-layered harmony, which is the thing that really appeals to me because it pricks my ears up and I think: “What’s going on there?”

-Simcock would like to help improve performance opportunities for young players:
“There used to be hundreds of little duo gigs in bars and restaurants, which may sound like it’s not a very important thing but to students, and people coming out of college this is the way you learn tunes and build up musical relationships through these gigs. So all of a sudden these gigs stopped because the places can’t afford thousands of pounds for licensing. These gigs just evaporated overnight, which is a real shame. There are jazz course at nearly all the colleges now and hundreds of people coming out of college each year and there just aren’t enough gigs for them. I could name dozens of musicians who are my age or younger and who are great musicians but people don’t get to hear them. That’s something I would like to change.”

The whole interview, which weighs in at over 4500 words, is on the Allaboutjazz site