Sam Richards

piano player improviser composer writer

I play piano or electric piano with two free improvisation bands.Synchronicity gives me the chance to play alongside the awesome Lou Gare (sax) and David Stanley (multi-effects guitar), and the majestic vocals of Sarah Frances. Sarah is also featured in The Hat Trick, the phenomenal talents of Harry S. Fulcher making up the trio. Free improvisation is a marketing nightmare, so the number of gigs is seriously limited. However, the ones we do get tend to be good ones. Synchronicity at a festival of new music in the Czech Republic in 2001 was a wow.

There's also an un-named jazz trio - Mick Green (saxes), David Barrow (bass), myself (piano) - which plays, amongst other gigs, on the first Friday of the month at the Maltsters Arms, Tuckenhay, near Totnes. Its a modest gig, hidden away in an idyllic valley with the river just outside the pub, but I love it - not least for the late night free-wheeling improvisation Mick and I get into.

I lead and compose music for the high spirited six piece Up Sticks whose CD on green Ltd actually got well reviewed in The Times. The reviewer said "Let's hope they up sticks and tour..." I would dearly love to.

More recently I started playing blues and boogie piano with bluesman Ray Minhinnett. This fulfils a lifelong wish to play rock and roll. At the other end of a very big spectrum I've also become half of Loopy and the Gruve Welderz alongside the technological wizardry and saxophone virtuosity of Andy Visser. Our electroacoustic improvisations on an assemblage of equipment that fills a performing area like an overflowing scrapyard takes us into everything from dance beats to squeaky toys.

What else? Well, I play for the soulful singing of Jo Walton, going for a late night feel - much enhanced by her surprising contributions on cello. I also love to improvise solo at the piano. I guess the solo thing often feels like the real me. But then I've recently recorded an album of songs (yes I sing!), pieces and improvisations for green Ltd, still to be issued. Look out in 2002 for Love Among The Ruins.

That's the playing, performing side of things. I also compose. I have done experimental pieces, graphic scores, environmental pieces, scored out piano pieces and, most recently, City of Dreams commissioned by Richard Gonsky, conductor of the Torbay Symphony Orchestra. A few years ago Long Room Productions made an hour-long documentary film, Sonic Harvest, about my ideas concerning music and the landscape.

I've had two books published. One was an autobiographical romp around the concept of musical democracy. The other was about that trickster of avant-garde art music, John Cage. A third, Artworks, is the best to date but still seeking a publisher, and I've started a fourth on popular song megastars of the 20th century - Marie Lloyd to Madonna.

I do part time teaching as well - mainly at the University of Plymouth and Dartington College of Arts.

So there it is - gruve welding to symphony orchestras, John Cage to Madonna, free improvisation, jazz, ballads and blues. Sometimes I think "will the real Sam Richards please stand up?", and envy those people who stick to one thing doggedly and get really good at it. I recently confessed to a good friend my concern at my eclecticism. His reply was "Yes, but whatever you do you always do it in the same way - pushing boundaries, inventing, and flouting convention". There is a grain of truth there, I feel.

How did I get here to this privileged place in life surrounded by musicians I respect and friends I love? My story has its high and lows - like anyone else's. I was born in 1949 in London, went to the usual awful schools, but loved further education. My late teens in London were a real high point - seeing John Cage, mixing with free jazzers, working in projects directed by Cornelius Cardew and the improvisation master Alfred Neiman. Then there was music college, which I dropped out of, and, after a move to Devon, a teachers' course which I got kicked out of.

Whether it was the Devon air or the general rural scene I don't know, but a sudden and extraordinary passion for folk music overtook me in my early 20s and lasted many years while I toured the country with folk bands and researched Westcountry grass roots musical traditions. In retrospect I believe it was probably the social nature of music making that appealed to me most about those local traditions. Exmoor farmers roaring out bawdy choruses in the pubs, Gypsies singing the ballads their grandparents taught them, squeezebox players knocking out hornpipes for Dartmoor step dancers - they kicked the pretentiousness out of music and art in general. They taught me to see music as a form of communication which is as much about survival as it is about entertainment, but which needs to be entertaining in order to survive.

In the 1980s, during a period of personal crisis, I drifted away from folklore and back to composition, improvisation and jazz, and that's roughly where I've stayed. I have retained a deep love of the traditional musics of the world and have the record collection to prove it. I also love all forms of popular music, including chart material that makes most of my friends wince.

I am constantly aware of how great it is to be living in a uniquely musical and artistic part of the country. In my local pub the conversations routinely range over art history, the local environment, all aspects of music, and many issues of social and spiritual awareness. The musicians I play with are awesome, many as good as any you'll find in London.

Having Chronic Fatigue Syndrome since about 1990 has restricted my life somewhat. My list of activities may seem broad, but I am only able to do a fraction of what I would wish at any of them. Funds can get low (whose can't?) and I don't intend to stay single much longer. Intuition (and some evidence) suggests my luck might be changing in these areas.(UPDATE - It has. Congratulations, Sam and Lona !)

Meanwhile, I carry on doing what I knew I would have to do since I was six years old - making music.

CONTACT Sam

Leechwell Flat, Leechwell Street,
Totnes, Devon. TQ9 5SX
Tel: 01803 867371
e-mail:sam @totnesjazzzcollective.org