Greg Foat
London-based keyboardist, composer, bandleader, and DJ Greg Foat is a musician completely of his time and somehow beyond it. His highly original "non-contemporary jazz" utilizes both conventional instruments and an exotic array of unorthodox ones, including harpsichord, tubular bells, and a 15-piece choir. Foat's music relies heavily on inspirations from library and soundtrack music, global folk traditions, psychedelia, hymnody, ambient music, and '60s and '70s pop, soul, and blues. Whether solo, as co-leader of Hampshire & Foat (with Bees' multi-instrumentalist Warren Hampshire), or leading the Greg Foat Group, he has quietly and purposefully dissolved artificial boundaries between musical genres and eras since 's 2011 debut Dark Is the Sun. He's also been a prolific recording artist, releasing an album per year, including the universally acclaimed 2015 outing Dancers at the Edge of Time and 2017's Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (with Hampshire), as well as a slew of singles and EPs. As a composer, he's heavily influenced by the lineage of British jazz pianists and composers, including Gorden Beck, Stan Tracy, Michael Garrick, Keith Tippet and Graham Collier, in addition to European and American composers, arrangers, and soloists such as Enio Morricone, Piero Piccione, Michel Legrand, Vangelis, and John Klemmer. Foat was born in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. He claims his life-long love/hate relationship with the piano began at age three when he fell off a piano stool at his aunt's house. At ten, he asked his parents for one. On the cheap upright his father procured, he taught himself to play Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" and received a few lessons from a proper piano teacher, who taught him a simple blues. He used that lesson to learn method, then taught himself to improvise and write; soon after, he quit taking lessons. A feverish record collector from age 11, he learned from recordings. A few years later, Jeff Clyne and Tevor Tomkins came to his school and gave a jazz workshop, after which he joined the Isle of Wight County Youth Jazz Orchestra. Clyne sent him cassettes of various jazz pianists. In a jazz encyclopedia, he learned that Clyne had recorded an album with pianist called Experiments with Pops. He wrote Clyne asking him about it and was sent a tape with the albums Experiments with Pops and Gyroscope on it. Under the spell of Beck's formidable playing, he wore the tape out and absorbed its secrets. Foat cites the pianist as his biggest influence. He was bold enough to ask for Beck's telephone number and eventually took a few lessons from him. Other primary influences on Foat were musicians who resided on the Isle of Wight, home to a vibrant music scene and a healthy number of retired session and jazz players who worked on the cruise ships that passed through from the '60s to the '80s. Their catholic repertoire consisted of music they learned, then played all over the world. Foat sat in with these players, learned from them, and developed his own aesthetic vision. Given his by-now-expansive repertoire, Foat became a session player and touring sideman, which included recording sessions with QuestLove and a tour of Europe and Scandinavia with Wendy James. In addition to his musical career, Foat is also a writer. He published a regular column in a woman's magazine in the U.K., and in 2008 published a spoof novel entitled Gigolo, ghostwritten and edited by a female friend. Supposedly penned from personal experience, Foat made publicity tours in his novel's character, causing considerable controversy. The book was eventually translated and published in seven languages.
