About
I am a South African jazz pianist, composer and musicologist, now based in the UK. Originally classically trained, I fell in love with jazz when I encountered the music of Grover Washington and Oscar Peterson towards the end of high school.
In the early 1990s, while doing a BMus jazz degree at the University of Natal, I co-founded the band Mosaic, which played a self-described ‘Indo-Afro-jazz’, combining North American jazz with aspects of African jazz, Western art music and Indian classical music. I was the group’s pianist and its primary composer. Based in Durban, we consciously sought to reflect in our music the cultural dynamics at play in that city. The band performed throughout South Africa, also giving concerts in the USA and UK, disbanding in 1999.
In 2004 I recorded the album ‘A Thought’, featuring Stan Sulzmann, for New Canvas Records. Extracts from this recording were incorporated into the soundtrack of Jyoti Mistry’s film We Remember Differently. I continue to compose and perform.
My work as a musicologist is strongly informed by my creative practice as a jazz composer and pianist. In particular, I am interested in how the musical experiences of jazz composers and performers (and, to a lesser extent, audience members) are mediated by their placements within larger social groupings defined by ‘race’ and place. I have edited a number of academic journals and supervised many postgraduate research projects.